


through a glass darkly

by flwrpotts



Category: Archie Comics & Related Fandoms, Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Cheating, F/F, F/M, Gratuitous amounts of angst, Time Jump, and dealing with trauma, but like badly, canon typical self harm, generalized sadness, im big enough to admit that this is partially inspired by the live action scooby doo movie, non core four major character death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-17
Updated: 2018-09-05
Packaged: 2019-06-28 14:27:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 21,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15709065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flwrpotts/pseuds/flwrpotts
Summary: The bell chimes, and Veronica stops dead in her tracks when she realizes Betty, Jughead, and Archie are in a booth, drinking millshakes and looking deep in discussion about something. For a horrible, violent moment, she’s sure that she’s hallucinating, flashing back to the first time that she ever stepped into the diner.There’s a collective intake of breath. Betty looks at her and Jughead looks at the floor and Archie looks up at the ceiling, blinking hard like he’s trying to clear his vision.Seconds pass, over and over and over, and Veronica doesn’t move, frozen to the spot, until finally Betty speaks, mouth curling into that enigmatic, Mona Lisa smile, not quite kind. “Veronica,” she says. “You should sit down.”OR.betty, jughead, veronica, and archie fell apart in the aftermath of the black hood's unmasking and archie's arrest. now, ten years later, another mysterious death forces them back to riverdale, and one another.





	1. part i.

**Author's Note:**

> ok so!!! im unbearably relieved im finally putting this monster out into the either at last, as ive been plunking away at it since season 2 ended. some notes: this disregards anything that's been relieved since season 2 ended, and the second chapter will feature a time jump ten years in the future. some recommended listening: "5 years" by david bowie, "clementine" by sarah gaffe, and "the chain" by ingrid michaelson.
> 
> tw for: ptsd, cheating, canon-typical self-harm, and generalized angst

 It wasn’t until we were well past the middle of it

that we realized

the old dull pain, whose stitched wrists and clammy fingers,

far from being subverted,

had only slipped underneath us, freshly scrubbed.

\- little beast, richard siken

* * *

 

I. BETTY

_tuesday. july 18th, 2018. 4:52 p.m_

“Let’s talk about the nightmares,” prompts the psychiatrist, using an index finger to push her cat eye glasses further up the bridge of her nose.

The office smells like air conditioning turned up too high, and Betty shifts in her seat, crossing and then uncrossing her legs. _Say something,_ Betty pleads to herself, but her brain comes up short. Silence hangs heavily, and Dr. Vardon jots something down in her notebook.

“Betty?” she prompts, voice kind but her gaze clinical, assessing.

“I don’t know what there is to say,” she replies, voice just a little too chilly to be polite. She glances quickly at the clock nestled on the desk, arranged in between a _platitude of the day_ calendar and a stress ball. Four more minutes. “They’re fine.”

“Why do you say that?”

Frustration gnaws at Betty, and she wrestles with the compulsive urge to curl her fingers into a fist, to shock her brain into a state of calm.

The therapy sessions, mandated by both Principal Weatherbee and Alice Cooper, are purportedly to help her come to terms with everything that’s unfolded over the past year, the string of murders and manipulations she keeps getting tangled up in, keeps tracing back to her own front door.

But instead, each session feels like a match of chess, a game of the unsaid where Betty can never tell what the score is, a little too close to the cat and mouse game she spent the winter losing for her to really trust Dr. Vardon. Instead, she spends the hour and a half each week answering vague questions with even vaguer answers, trying to shape herself into the person Dr. Vardon expects her to be.

“Why do I say they’re fine?” she echoes dully, snapping back to the conversation too quick, and Dr. Vardon nods. Betty flexes her fingers outwards, a dumb kind of progress.

“Because they are. It isn’t happening as often, anymore. And when they do, I’m able to just wake up and then fall back asleep.”

It’s a lie, and they both know it, but Betty keeps her chin up and eyes forward, daring the doctor to call her bluff. She wants to explain that blood has nothing to do with the way that a thing hurts, but to say it aloud would be a kind of betrayal, giving up a valuable piece of information with no recognizable net gain.

“I’m more interested in why the nightmares are starting in the first place,” Dr. Vardon says instead, and Betty bristles at the word _interested_ , like she is nothing more than a lab experiment. Something to be studied under a microscope, every nervous tic and irritated sigh dissected and turned into another grain of evidence for the doctor’s foregone conclusions about _trauma_ and _coping_.

Betty forces a stilted laugh at the question. “My father turned out to be a serial killer,” she says, and the words clog in her throat, sound ridiculous, like something that happened to a different person. “Wouldn’t it be more surprising if I didn’t have nightmares?”

Dr. Vardon doesn’t reply to that, just studies Betty with that same look, and finally, finally, the session is over, the hour hand inching past the five.

Betty waits three beats before she collects her Kate Spade purse from the floor, trying to make it seem like she isn’t desperate to leave.

“Have a good week,” she says, smiling politely at Dr. Vardon, one hand reaching down to press flat against the rough material of her mint green shorts.

The doctor smiles, something absent about the expression, distracted. “Thank you, Betty. You as well.”

The sunset is dipping into the horizon when Betty steps out the door to walk home, flattening Riverdale out until everything is gold and warm looking, like something from a dream half-remembered.

The beauty of it all unsettles her, creates a flickery double vision between Riverdale as it is and Riverdale as it looks, and she thinks randomly of Jason Blossom, who would have turned eighteen alongside Cheryl three days ago.  

Betty digs her flip phone, a cheap, middle school relic, out of her purse and dials Veronica’s number from memory, looking for something to kill time on the twenty minute walk back to her house. The android was purchased after she accidentally smashed three iPhones in as many weeks and insurance wouldn’t cover another one, even with two people off the family plan.

The phone rings almost to the end before Veronica picks up, voice muffled like the reception is bad, even though they can’t be more than a few miles apart.

“B! Sorry for the delay, I’m still not used to your new number.”

There’s a strange edge to Veronica’s voice, a hard, artificial brightness, like she’s been crying and doesn’t want Betty to know it.

“That’s fine, V,” she replies slowly, trying to gauge whether or not she should pry. “I’m just walking home, and figured I’d call to catch up. Are you around tonight? We haven’t had a movie night in awhile.”

“You know I’d love to, but I have a meeting with Sierra McCoy about the emancipation proceedings in an hour, and then Daddy’s contractor is coming tonight to talk about renovations for the speakeasy. Rain check?”

Disappointment curdles in Betty’s chest, and she tries to picture Veronica on the other end of the line, her best friend’s glossy, dark hair and unflinching poker face. There was a time when she would offer to come be moral support at the meetings, make lemonade for the contractor and be there in any way she could.

“Of course, Ronnie,” she replies after a beat. “No problem. Is there anything I can help with?”

“You’re an angel,” Veronica replies grandly, with some of that old Lodge magic. “No, I’m fine, but thank you. Just focus on taking care of yourself, alright, B?”

Something about the statement pricks at Betty. “I always do,” she says, and there’s a moment of awkward silence.

“Alright, well, I should go and change,” says Veronica. “Talk soon, okay?”

“Bye, Ronnie,” Betty says, and the dial tone rings in her ear, something in it lonely sounding.

x.

_wednesday. july 19th, 2018. 3:07a.m._

Betty twists up off the bed, throat raw from screaming and still sobbing, jolted into consciousness and in the throes of a panic attack before she even realizes she’s awake.

The room is pitch black and her sheets are damp with sweat, blood patterned like constellations from her palms, and Betty jerks out of bed, kicking an ankle too hard when it gets tangled in the comforter.

The feeling is like liquid terror injected into her brain, a fear that knocks everything else out of her skull, something primitive that she has no answers for.

The dark is making it worse; that sick, paranoid feeling of being watched coming to life in the shadows that creep along her walls. Her brain teases colors out of the unreal blackness of the room, scenes that flash luridly across her bedroom walls- Midge Klump’s crucified body and her father’s eyes and Cheryl’s blood-soaked slip the night she threatened her mother into kindness. Betty fumbles to switch on her bedside table lamp, fingers shaking as she struggles with the cord.

Light floods the room, sudden and insistent, and she pulls back to glance her massacred palms, the smeared blood and dark, blackish puncture wounds sending a new round of adrenaline straight to her spine, blood sticky where it slides down her wrists. There’s a dirty sort of metallic in her mouth, like loose change, and she presses her thumb into the raw spot on her bottom lip, where she must have bitten down too hard.

“Shit,” she gasps, through sobs, trying to wipe away the worst of the mess on her pink pajama bottoms. The nightmare keeps happening around her, even now that she knows she’s awake, even as the logic is trying to outpace the fear.

Betty can’t think about the dreams head on, the horror she is capable of in her subconscious. She doesn’t have the vocabulary for that kind of terror, so she sobs instead, stumbles to the bathroom like someone half-drunk. She finds herself grateful for the first time that her mother’s new found reliance on sleeping pills keeps her dead to the world all night, completely inaccessible, untroubled by her youngest child’s breakdown.

The fluorescent light of the hall bathroom is a minor comfort, the light sterile and unyielding, and Betty crumples to the ground, hard enough that she can feel where her knees are going to bruise purple and green. Her crying is still hysterical, unhinged, and she retches into the toilet, chest tight and shoulders moving too quick.

Betty dry heaves, but there’s nothing in her stomach to throw up, no relief from the strangled pressure in her chest. She slumps onto the floor, muscles exhausted and still wound too tight, fight or flight looping through her system.

It feels as if she’s had a fever her whole life, like her heart is finally slowing down, succumbing to the relentless pressure. The feeling makes her want her mother, or the version of her that exists only in childhood memories, Alice’s flat ginger ale and dry toast routine that did nothing but felt good anyways.

The panic attack still has her by the throat, nightmares where it’s her choking Ms. Grundy with a violin bow, feeling her scared rabbit heartbeats and liking it, liking it like a wild sort of justice, the drain of her life against Betty’s hands, sure for once, right for once. _We’re the same, Elizabeth_ drawls a slick, automated voice in her hair, and she gags again, fighting to convince herself that it’s untrue.

Betty gropes for her cellphone up on the sink and dials blindly, trying not to let memories of the Black Hood calls (no, her father’s calls) drag her back under the tide as she dials by memory.

Jughead’s voice is soft, cracked with sleep, the sound enough to break her heart. “Betts?” he asks, and Betty hears him flick on the light in his room, the rustling of comforters as he sits up in bed. “Are you alright?”

She tries to get the hyperventilation under control, but it’s a losing battle, because she’s so scared, she’s so _scared_ , the world has gone out from underneath her and her family the way it was is forever gone and every protective mechanism she’s built up has proved futile in the wake of all this death.

And it is death- death to her childhood and death to her family and death to Riverdale and death to _her,_ death to Betty Cooper: straight A student, girl next door. She’s gone, some unfamiliar thing left in her place, formless and petrified, stumbling around with the genetic code of a serial killer spiraling through her DNA.

“Can you just-” she starts, voice spindled like broken glass. ‘D’you think you can come over? For a couple minutes?”

“Are you okay?” Jughead asks, frantic now, a wrong note in a good piece of music, and she sobs, presses a hand to her face,

“Please, Jughead?” she says, and she listens to the sound of him shoving on sneakers and fumbling for the keys to the bike, knowing she doesn’t deserve his kindness and too selfish to deny herself it.

“Be there in five,” he promises, hanging up the phone, and Betty exhales into the blistering silence, panic a slippery thing around her lungs. She sinks her nails back into her palms, the wounds already bloody and raw, the familiar sting doing nothing to her frayed nerves, just a new bite on all the other ones. “Shit,” she says, to herself, at a loss for anything better. “Shit.”

Her face is wet with blood or tears, she can’t really tell which, and that’s how Jughead finds her, hunched on the bathroom floor and still dry heaving into the toilet, bloody fingerprints against the porcelain, crying so hard she can’t really breathe.

The sound of her window opening had sent the panic spinning out again, a car on black ice, turning her insides out. She’s terrified in a way she doesn’t know what to do with, the feeling of it heart-stopping, no space for her to get used to it. “I’m sorry,” she sobs, and Jughead sits down next to her, tentatively, terrified for all different reasons.

There’s a David Bowie record still going in her bedroom, the sound muddled and nostalgic, singing about the end of the world, about a girl drinking milkshakes in an ice-cream parlor, _I kiss you, you’re beautiful, I want you to walk_.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, and she wants to say _everything_ but doesn’t.

Jughead moves to take her hand. She flinches, which makes him start back, and then she is apologizing and he is trying to comfort her and the whole of it is lonelier than being alone ever was. She can see the end, if she looks hard enough. The song ends, and silence hovers through the air before the next track kicks in.

Betty inhales a ragged, shuddering breath, and stands up, unsteady on her feet. Her sobbing has given way abruptly to an eerie, zombie-like silence, a running train coming to a dead stop.

She washes her hands, not flinching at the sting of warm water, and then brushes her teeth, pointedly avoiding her reflection in the mirror. When she’s done she turns and kisses Jughead hard, pressing him back into the counter.

“Betty-“ he says, half cautious, half confused, riddled through with worry. She inhales sharply, the sound nearly a sob.

“Please, Jug,” she whispers. “Please. I just need to feel- something. Anything.”

She just wants the feeling, some sort of proof that she’s alive, something to startle her brain out of its downward spiral. She presses a hand to his jaw, trying to telecommunicate everything that she feels, and Jughead’s face is shuttered when he kisses her, hands snaking up to hold her against him, a little too tight.

x.

_wednesday. july 19th, 2018. 6:21a.m._

Betty wakes up on the floor of her bedroom, limbs tangled through Jughead’s and her comforter dragged out over their bodies. It would be a sweet scene, if not for the nail marks at her forehead, or the bruise that rings Jughead’s forearm from where she held on too tight.

She drags herself up off the wooden floor, limbs aching, and makes her way to the bathroom. She takes care of her butchered palms and brushes out her knotted, saltwater sticky hair, yanks it into a somewhat presentable ponytail. It’s a long process, stitching the illusion back together, concealer patted on the dark half moons ringing her eyes, bandaids pressed on the bloody ones across her palms.

When she’s done, lip gloss smoothing over her chapped, bruised mouth and a collared sweater emphasizing the blonde of her ponytail, she looks like Betty Cooper again, like a person who bad things have not happened to.

It’s still early morning, before seven, and the sky is an apocalyptic shade of pink when she steps back into her bedroom. Betty looks at Jughead, curled on her floor in plaid pajama bottoms and an oversized sweater with holes in the collar because he’s always freezing, even in the summer, and something about it makes her ache for the boy he was once, the child she had barely known before he was gone. She tucks the covers up around his shoulders, possessed by some indefinable urge.

Her mother isn’t awake yet, so Betty starts breakfast in the kitchen alone, the familiar routine of chopping vegetables and cracking eggs enough to settle the last of the nerves throttling her system, remnants of the night before.

The entire thing is too painful to think about directly, so she doesn’t, lets her brain edge around the memories of her blood slick palms and childlike sobbing and Jughead’s fingers at the knobs of her spine. She makes a pot of too-strong coffee and lets the dull burn of it against her tongue soothe her, an easy, understandable sort of pain.

Jughead comes down the stairs at half past eight, just as she’s finished flipping a last chocolate chip pancake onto the too-tall stack. She pours him a mug of coffee, adds a splash of milk just how he likes it, and passes it over, pasting a grin on her face.

“Morning!” she says too brightly. “How’d you sleep?”

Jughead somehow looks more unsettled than he did the night before. His eyes flick down to her hands, wrapped in flesh-toned band-aids that are impossible to spot unless you’re searching, and Betty wraps her hands around her mug of coffee, hiding them from view.

“Betty-” Jughead starts, voice laced through with apprehension, and she sets the scrambled eggs down on the table with a little more force than necessary.

“Are you hungry?” she asks. “I made pancakes, and, um, scrambled eggs, but there’s also fruit in the fridge if you want that, or-”

“Betty,” Jughead repeats, something desperate in his tone, paused in the doorway. She falters under his gaze, strangely nervous, even more so when she realizes that he is, too. “What happened, last night?”

She swallows the urge to dig her nails back into her palms. “It was just a nightmare,” she says, too casual. “I’m sorry I woke you up.”

“Betts-” he starts, for the third time, and then falters. “I’m worried about you,” he says lamely, finally, something soft and fragile in his expression.

Betty takes the three steps forward to reach him, and kisses him, just a peck on the mouth, nothing like the night before. “Don’t be,” she reassures, trying to convince herself as much as she is him. “I’m fine. Perfect.”

Jughead looks dubious, but she meets his stare dead-on, eyes pleading.

He nods, doubtful but unwilling to push any further, and for some reason she feels like crying again. He turns, sitting down at the breakfast table, and she presses her thumbnail into the strip of skin above her waistband, leaning into the sting. _You are going to leave me,_ she thinks to herself, and then goes to get maple syrup from the fridge.

 

II. JUGHEAD

 _wednesday. july_ _19th, 2018. 9:02am_

He leaves Betty’s house in the morning with a peck on the cheek and a sick, uneasy coiling in his stomach, something akin to helplessness. It reminds him of being a kid, the winter that Jellybean had an ear infection and their health insurance hadn’t covered the necessary antibiotic, the way she had screamed all night and there was nothing that he could do to soothe her, frantic and crying himself.

“Have a good day,” Betty had said softly as he left, and if he didn’t look too closely she was still the Betty of earlier years, sliding a cookie sheet into the oven with her Martha Stewart oven mitts on. It’s disorienting, the quick snap with which she shuts down and becomes a parody of herself, more like a well-trained actress than human being.

“You can talk to me, you know,” he tells her over breakfast, hesitant, and her smile had been razor edged.

“I know, Juggie. You can too.”

It’s an ironically perfect summer’s day when he steps out the front door, heat shimmering the air above the pavement, giving it a sense of a dream, and Jughead slides onto his bike, the baked leather nearly too hot to touch.

Flashes of the previous night keep stuttering into his vision- Betty’s incoherent sobbing and haunted eyes, clutching at the collar of his shirt. His childhood best friend, the girl he spent summer days exactly like this one making up adventures and reading in the treehouse, sick on terror, bloody palmed and kissing him hard.

She had passed out after, curled on the floor of her bedroom, her face peaceful, younger in sleep, but Jughead had stayed up until his heart had stopped racing, until dawn had begun to seep into the curtains. _All I want,_ he had thought to himself, curling a lock of baby fine blonde hair around his finger. _Is to make this easier for you._

It’s not quite true. Jughead wants lots of things. Wants Betty to be okay, wants her to stop shutting the world out with pastel cardigans, wants Archie out of jail, wants Veronica to drop the fucking _speakeasy_ idea. Wants to take back the mantle of the Serpent King, wants his father to stop drinking, wants his mom to come home with her menthol cigarettes and conditional love. Wants to go back to before this year, before he fully understood what _life or death_ meant, before he saw Midge Klump’s body suspended in the air, before a gunshot on July 4th changed the center of gravity in a town where nothing bad was supposed to happen.

Jughead wants an apartment in a city where no one knows his name and for his writing to be sharp enough to slice through the messy, confusing hurt inside him.

 _Waste your summer praying in vain for a savior to rise from these streets,_ beckons the radio, and Jughead peels out of the driveway, the sound of the engine too loud for the quiet suburban street.

 x.

_wednesday. july 19th. 9:23a.m_

Toni is already waiting in a booth at Pop’s when he arrives, sipping at a mug of coffee with far too much hazelnut creamer and reading a book, some sort of dry nonfiction that only she would find interesting.

He sinks into the booth across from her, apology on the tip of his tongue, but Toni speaks before he can. “Rough night?” she asks as she puts down the book, cataloguing the exhausted lines of his face.

“Something like that,” he replies.

“How’s she doing?” she asks, sympathetic, and Jughead opens the sticky, laminated menu that he’s had memorized since he was eleven, searching for an answer that doesn’t feel like a lie.

“She’s- coping,” he replies. “We both are.”

“Give it time,” Toni says knowingly. “She’s been through the ringer.” She looks at him, and her face changes, becomes a little bit softer. “You both have.”

“Yeah, well,” he says. “We all have.”

The waitress arrives, and Toni must have ordered already, because she sets down food for the both of them, the breakfast special for Jughead and a stack of pancakes that are larger than Toni’s head, doused in whipped cream and butter.

She takes a bite and then immediately shifts into business mode, and Jughead realizes with a sinking feeling that this is not a breakfast between friends, but a strategy session that he has no answers for. He takes a bite of bacon, trying to hide his consternation.

“So, I just talked to Fred,” Toni begins, a bad start. “He was apologetic, but he can’t host more than three Serpents in the house anymore.”

Jughead feels panic kick up his heartbeat, accompanied by the keen sting of betrayal. _Fuck._ “I thought he said he could take five?” he asks, and Toni rolls her eyes.

“That was before Archie’s legal bills came in. Apparently, even being a good-looking straight white boy can’t protect you from second degree murder charges.”

Jughead thinks painfully of his best friend, the golden boy, hometown hero, trapped in a jail cell. None of them have been allowed to see Archie since his arrest, even after Veronica went down to the station and refused to leave. Even with Sierra McCoy’s legal aid, it’s a difficult case, no thanks to Hiram and Hermione.

“Fuck,” he says aloud, and pinches the bridge of his nose, the same way his mother used to do when she would sit and do their taxes at the kitchen table. “I knew it was gonna happen sooner or later, but-“

Toni nods grimly. “Apparently, his welcome expired pretty quick.”

“What are we gonna do?” Jughead asks her, already trying to figure out who’s going to stay and who they’re going to ask to leave, where they can find housing, how to pay for groceries. The anxious clockwork of his brain spins, trying to find some sort of solution.

“I thought _you_ were supposed to be the Serpent King,” Toni says dryly, an edge of bitterness to her voice.

“Don’t remind me,” Jughead says. His brain flashes back to that day, the damp roll of clouds overhead, the leather jacket at his back, that tangled mix of pride and shame he feels every time he looks at his father, every time FP looks back at him.

“How’s FP2 faring?” Toni asks, reading his mind, and Jughead’s mood becomes, if possible, even more dismal.

“Back off the wagon,” he says, and it’s a relief to finally say it, to tell someone. Betty is already burdened enough with her own family drama without him adding his onto it, him and Veronica have never been close enough for those sorts of conversations, and Archie is in fucking _prison._ “Went straight from cheap beer to the harder stuff.”

Toni looks at him, only the barest softening of her features betraying any sort of sympathy. “I’m sorry, Jughead,” she says, but the words ring a little hollow. She doesn’t have any family at all; besides her addict uncle who only cares for her on his whims.

“I should’ve seen it coming. _Too good to be true,_ and all that. Anyways, he’s in no position to be pulling strings, and at this point I’m not sure there are any strings to be pulled,” Jughead says, and Toni’s mouth tightens. They’re really on their own, no more adult Serpent to help them keep their heads above the water.

“How about Lodge?” Toni asks. “Any chance she’ll give up on the deluded rich girl Prohibition fantasy and divest the money towards something _actually_ useful?”

Jughead thinks of Veronica’s excited-teetering-on-manic chattering about the speakeasy last time he saw her, and shakes his head.

“I can ask, but the chances are- very slim. She’s going through the emancipation process right now, and Hiram’s giving her hell. Betty thinks she’s coping by putting all her energy into refurbishing it.”

“Poor little rich girl,” snarks Toni, and Jughead is privately inclined to agree with her, as fond as he is of his girlfriend’s best friend and best friend’s girlfriend.

“What are our other options?” He asks, steering the conversation forward. “Even with Fred taking three, we have- what? Six more minors with no place to live. They can’t crash in the Wyrm forever. We gotta figure something out.”

“I have a solution,” Toni says. “But you aren’t going to like it.” Jughead feels strangely manipulated, like she questioned him about FP and Veronica only to better her chances of him agreeing to whatever she’s about to propose. But at this point, resignation outweighs any sense of betrayal. He sighs, and signals Pop for another cup of coffee.

“I’m willing to do anything at this point that doesn’t leave six teenagers homeless,” he says. Toni nods.

“So, first step is moving everyone who can’t stay at Fred’s into Cheryl’s. She’s got a bunch of spare bedrooms and nobody to fill them.”

Jughead swallows down his distaste for Cheryl. “Okay,” he says slowly. “What’s the catch.”

Now it’s Toni’s turn to look uncomfortable. “The problem is that Cheryl has a lot of space, but not a lot of money,” she says. “All of her accounts are frozen while Claudius and Penelope try to screw her out of her inheritance. She can offer bedrooms, but stuff like groceries, school supplies, clothes- we’re on our own.”

“We can make it work,” Jughead says. “I’ll start working at the grocery store again, and then with the money-“

“Jughead,” Toni says, cutting him off. “We both know that isn’t going to be enough.”

He sighs for what feels like the fourth time in as many minutes. “Yeah. I know. Shit.” He presses his palms to his eyelids, hard enough that he can see stars.

“I have an idea for that, too,” Toni says cautiously. “This is the part you’re not going to like.”

Jughead waves his hand, in a beaten down sort of gesture.

“We have to start dealing again,” Toni says, not beating around the bush.

“No,” Jughead says, a gut instinct reaction, angry before he can process why. “Toni, no-“

“Nothing major,” she insists. “Coke, Addy, things that your rich Northside buddies like. Small scale. I talked to a friend of my dad’s, he’s willing to sell in bulk, have us do the distribution. It would easily make us enough to provide for everyone, with enough to spare to eventually start getting trailers again. Building the community back up.”

“And what happens when Fangs gets arrested for _dealing?”_ Jughead spits. “Or Sweet Pea?”

“What happens when they’re living on the street, Jughead?” Toni replies, voice just as sharp. “I know you’re an idealist, but our options are limited at the moment. At this point there’s no magic solution. It’s the lesser of two evils, and you know it.”

Jughead feels like crying, in a terrible sort of way. He took on the title of Serpent King with all of his noble ambition to turn it around, with the assurance of Archie’s smile at his back and Betty’s hand in his own, with his father’s blessing for the first time in either of their lives. He feels the tunnel tightening around him, future reduced to a pinprick in a blacked out sky. Like father, like son.

“This isn’t something we can come back from,” he argues, more resigned than before.

Toni laughs, the sound mean. “Stop acting like we have that much moral high ground to stand on. I watched when you held Penny down and sliced off part of her fucking arm. I helped you cover that up.” Jughead winces, but she continues undaunted. “We were past the point of coming back a long, long time ago, Jughead. At this point, we’re preventing teenagers from having to live out of a bar. That’s a net good.”

“Okay,” he says, all the fight tired out of him a long, long time ago. The stitches on his bicep hurt, and he surreptitiously slides a few fingers under the leather of his jacket, trying to see if they’ve ripped.

“Nobody said this was going to be easy, Jughead,” Toni says, not unkindly, and he nods tersely.

“But only you, me, SP, or Fangs deal,” he says, not negotiable, thinking of the two fourteen year olds he’s somehow in charge of.

“Agreed,” Toni says easily. “I’ll call my guy tonight.”

The waitress comes over then, coffee stained apron and too-bright lipstick feathered into the creases of her mouth.

“Anything else I can get for you?” she asks, disinterested, and even Pop’s isn’t what it used to be. Both of them shake their heads, and she disappears to get the check.

“Everything is going to work out,” Toni says firmly, and the lie rings in Jughead’s ears.

“Yeah,” he says, and the corner of his mouth turns up in sardonic amusement. “That’s what people keep telling me.”

 x.

_wednesday. july 19th, 2018. 6:42pm._

He spends the rest of the day talking to all the younger Serpents, helps them gather up their things  and move into Cheryl Blossom’s house of horrors. It’s a strain, trying to be reassuring, a comforting force, when there is no steady point in his life, not one thing he can depend on as being there.

Jughead was never meant to be a leader. Betty made fun of him for it once, across a booth at Pop’s, sharing a milkshake and stupidly, wildly in love the way only people in the movies were supposed to be. “You’re the rebel, the one railing against the power structure,” she had teased fondly, shuffling some of her fries over onto his plate.

He had agreed, at the time, and then taken the jacket anyway.

 _Betty,_ he thinks, and his chest aches a little. He dials her number and listens to her ringtone, the one she’s set to _Four Seasons._ Spring, he thinks, though classical music was never quite his forte.

It goes to voicemail, Betty’s chipper voice imploring whoever’s on the other line to _leave a message, and I’ll get back to you soon!_ He doesn’t know why he expected a different result.

The trailer is empty, FP gone on another bender that will only end when someone else intervenes, and even in the summer the trailer is cold, a sort of pain in the deepest part of his bones. It’s still too early, but he changes into pajamas and crawls into bed, planning to whittle away the nighttime hours with Netflix documentaries and the stomach-turning anticipation to see if Betty will call.

The helplessness is awful. He can’t help her when he’s there and he can’t do anything when he’s gone, and the weeks keep feeding into a wide-open drain and nothing is changing, things are only getting worse, and worse, and worse.

There’s a ring at the doorbell, and Jughead starts, wondering if someone has come to drop his father on the doorstep so early. The dread seeps into his stomach, like a sip of cold water when you’re starving for food. He pads into the kitchen and wrenches open the door, hot with loneliness.

It is not FP and some vaguely well-intentioned Southsider on the other side. Rather, it’s Veronica Lodge, lipstick smudged and breathing hard, something desolate in her expression that he can feel himself a mirror of.

“Hello,” she says primly, some long ago social grace that has no cachet here. “Do you have anything to drink?”

Jughead opens the door and invites her inside.

 

III. VERONICA

_wednesday. july 19th, 2018. 5:16p.m_

Veronica thinks about her phone call with Betty yesterday and exhales in a painful sort of relief, bittersweet at the back of her mouth. The neat set of lies she told Betty on the phone won't stand up to any sort of close scrutiny, but Betty’s attention to detail has wilted in the summer heat, and besides, Veronica is an excellent liar, sixteen years as a Lodge giving her a preternatural ability of when to bluff and when to distract, how to slip in just enough truth to skate around the lip of suspicion.

Here are the facts: the speakeasy plan was doomed from the beginning, the pipe dream of a girl who was all confidence and no control. She is losing her custody battle day by day. Archie is in prison, and it is her fault.

She paces quickly up the steps to Shankshaw, shoulder blades skewered back with tension, turning her excellent posture into something extreme, something nearly grotesque. The weather is nearly unbearable, one of those July heat waves that kills any sign of life, and she can feel her dark lipstick start to melt, seep into the fine creases of her mouth.

The receptionist at the desk is a grim, humorless woman with a perm straight out of another time period. Veronica gives her brightest, most winning smile, avoids the urge to fiddle with pencil skirt.

“Hi,” she says, mentally gritting her teeth, trying to radiate charm. “I have a visitation scheduled for five thirty. Archie Andrews is the name.”

The receptionist ( _Flo,_ reads the name tag on her faded blue blouse) peers humorlessly at Veronica and glances down at her ancient computer screen.

“Through the doors on the left,” she says after a moment. “A guard will guide you through security.”

“Thank you _so_ much,” she replies, probably laying it on a little too thick, but lacking the finesse to care. Flo doesn’t reply, just returns to the grocery store paperback in her lap, something with a swooning woman on the cover.

Veronica is walked briskly through the security measures, and she resists the urge to roll her eyes when the security guard spends a little too long patting her down. Nerves are starting to bloom to life in her stomach, mixing with the tangled blend of guilt and anticipation and _want._ She misses Archie in a terrible, primal sort of way, in a way that scares her with its intensity.

She wants his smile pressed to her hairline and his mouth pressed to her temple, wants his easy humor and warm hands, wants the comfort of his presence, his goodness that runs straight to the bone. She wants Archie. So kind that he made her nervous, all those months ago in a coat closet neither of them had any business being in.

“Right this way,” says the guard, and she snaps out of her reverie, taking into account the damp concrete walls, the smell of mildew and mothballs seeped into the air.

She sits in the uncomfortable, straight backed chair, and then Archie is in front of her, her boy, dressed in an orange jumpsuit that clashes terribly with his shock of hair, the color too bright in the dull room.

She means to say _Archiekins,_ something teasing and fond, but instead all that comes out is a strangled _Arch,_ pressing her hand to the glass like something out of a movie.

“Veronica,” he replies, not the _Ronnie_ she was expecting.

He looks exhausted, multicolored bruising laced around his eyes and a hopeless, tired set to his mouth that she doesn’t recognize. His knuckles are split and scabbed over, and Veronica cannot help but notice that the marks look like mirror images to the ones that scar Betty’s palms.

 _You did this,_ whispers the snide, terrible voice in her head. _You did this, you did this, you did this-_

“How are you?” she asks, not entirely sure she wants to know the answer.

Archie shrugs, the gesture boyish, a shadow of the person he used to be. Guilt steals the breath out of her lungs.

“I’m alright,” he says. “I talked to Mom yesterday, and she told me that the case is probably going to go to trial in a few weeks. Hopefully I’ll be home before school starts again.”

“We all miss you,” she says, honesty grating at her throat. “Me and Betty and Jughead.”

A faint smile tugs at Archie’s mouth at that. “How are they?” he asks eagerly. “How are _you?”_

Veronica tries to think of a truthful answer that isn’t just _terrible._ She thinks of Betty’s hollow cheer and Jughead’s dark circles, the feeling of something winding to a close in her chest.

“They’re doing- okay,” she manages finally, not quite right. “They’re worried about you.” She pointedly doesn’t mention how she’s doing.

“Tell them I miss them,” he says earnestly, and Veronica nods tightly.

They both fish for something to say, Veronica’s endless topics of small talk- weather, celebrities, books- all falling short, feeling cheap. The chasm of everything unsaid between them runs too wide, and Veronica doesn’t know how to broach any of it, all of the choices they did or did not make that led them to this exact point, separated by a pane of bulletproof glass and a murder charge.

“I love you, Ronnie,” he says, quiet and sure. It’s what he says when all else fails, when their backs against the wall, a strange sort of Hail Mary play. She tries not to wince.

 _I love you, too_ she wants to reply. _I love you Archie Andrews._ It’s true, but she loves him selfishly, loves him more than anyone else in the world, loves him in a violent sort of way, like she’d burn down cities to keep him safe, forsake her family if it meant he would go unharmed.

She loves him, but if she had never met him right now he would be at football practice, making plays as the cicadas sang and the sunset turned the world golden. She loves him, but he is in a jail cell.

Her head is a horrible riot. How terrifying it is, needing something like that. Wanting love so badly that you would do anything for it.

“I’m going to get you out,” she promises, and there’s an embarrassing tremor in her voice as she says it, a shivering vulnerability.

Archie looks at her sadly, and she can’t tell what he’s thinking, their psychic hotline severed, that small, magical hum of electricity that used to thrum to life whenever they made eye contact from across the room.

“Just focus on taking care of yourself, Ronnie,” he says.

“I always do,” she says, just barely hiding the knife bladed sarcasm that threatens to bubble over.

“Time’s up,” says the security guard, emerging from the corner of the room, and Veronica swallows hard at the panic that bubbles up in her throat.

“Just five more minutes,” she says, pleading, and the guard’s smile is mean, crooked. “Please.”

He doesn’t reply, just wraps a hand around her forearm and steers her out. All she wants is thirty more seconds, fifteen, anything scrap of time she can get, enough time to tell him that she does love him she _does._

Veronica walks out the front door of Shankshaw with her arms wrapped tightly around herself. It’s still light out, but the air has dulled from unbearably hot to a breezy sort of warmth, the sun dipping lazily into the horizon.

Everything is so beautiful that it aches, and for a moment she misses New York City in the summer, abandoned by tourists and those wealthy enough to afford summer homes, the rush of the subway the only stirring of stale, flat air. Summers in the city are always brimming with promise, another rooftop celebration, another club opening, another evening spent skinny dipping in closed hotel pools.

Veronica wraps her arms around herself for a moment, fighting back a shiver.

She remembers thinking, after Jason Blossom’s killer had been discovered, that Archie was the last one of them that was still a little naive, a little bit bloody-kneed, thoughtful about what might come next. She wants to keep him there, in that moment. Untouched by all the nightmares.

Her world of magically appearing town cars with men in suits and blacked out windows is gone, so she starts to walk home, outfit completely inappropriate for the occasion and misery turning sickeningly inside her stomach.

 _I don’t have the constitution for low self-esteem_ she had joked once, in better times, and Jughead had rolled his eyes but smiled anyways, Betty and Archie exchanging one of their conversational glances. But now she wants to crawl out of her own skin, start again, turn back the clock, do anything to keep her from having to exist in this exact moment.

Shame is an all-consuming sort of emotion, one she wants to escape, badly. The walk from Shankshaw to Pop’s is a long one, requiring cutting through Southside, and people lingering outside of the few remaining trailers give her long, unpleasant, entirely warranted stares.

Veronica spots the Jones trailer, one of the nicer ones, settled near the back of the land, and some inarticulate need for escape makes her turn off the main road, heels sinking into the soft earth.  

She raps her knuckles on the tin front door, and Jughead swings it open a few moments later, looking about as bad as she feels.

“Hello,” she says stiffly. “Do you have anything to drink?”

They exchange a look, one full of meaning, and Veronica can see the end of all this, if she looks hard enough. Jughead opens the door, and she steps inside.

 x. 

 _wednesday_. _july 19th. 2018. 7:47p.m._

All that they have in the fridge is cheap beer, so Jughead cracks open two bottles of Miller Lite and hands one to Veronica silently. She perches on the cheap laminate counter and winces at the taste, but takes a large sip anyways, examining the contours of the small room.

“How’s FP?” she asks, searching for some topic of conversation to alleviate the bloated, alien silence. She and Jughead have always been able to fill up the quiet with their disagreements or semi-playful bickering.

Jughead shrugs a shoulder, the gesture nearly a flinch.

“I have no idea,” he says lowly, ending the subject. “How’s Archie?”

This time it’s Veronica’s turn to stiffen.

“He’s doing alright,” she says. “I visited him today, and the prison conditions leave something to be desired but-“ she lifts a shoulder elegantly. “The case is looking good. He told me to tell you that he missed you.”

“Never thought I’d see the day that Archie Andrews was sending me messages from prison,” Jughead replies, sardonic, and it isn’t meant to be malicious but it feels that way anyways.

“This god damned town,” she says, because Riverdale is always the easiest to blame for their personal Greek tragedies.

There isn’t much to say to that, so they drink in silence, the quiet a little more companionable.

She and Jughead make their way through the rest of the case too quickly, until warmth buzzes through her chest. It doesn’t fix the torrents of grief and shame and anger and longing that stir through her head, just makes them a little more nebulous, more difficult to pin the source of. She hops off the counter, a little unsteady on her feet, and turns to place the last bottle of beer by the recycling.

Jughead is doing the same thing with his, and they bump into one another, him reaching out one hand to steady her when she stumbles backwards.

Veronica breathes in raggedly. Jughead is staring at her, no light in his blue eyes, but his hand is warm on her arm, burning up, like he has a fever, and she is so cold.

 _This is something that you cannot come back from,_ the sensible part of her brain whispers, but Veronica left the sensible part of herself behind a long, long time ago.

She doesn’t know who kisses who fist, only that suddenly Jughead’s mouth is on hers, her hands are fisted in his dark hair. There is a part of her that is panicky already, wants to take it all back, but the largest part just wants to _forget,_ just wants to drown out all of the screaming in her head with something that demands every bit of her attention.

He hauls her up onto the table, and her fingers scratch long lines down the smooth skin of his back, leaving angry red marks behind, nothing at all gentle or kind about it. Archie always touched her delicately, softly, like she was something precious, something worthwhile.

There is none of that with Jughead. She doesn’t know whether he’s pissed at her or himself, or maybe both, but they tug roughly at one another’s clothes, and she bites hard on his lower lip, Jughead making a soft sound at the sting.

He walks her back into his bedroom, and she peels off her pencil skirt and stockings as she goes, still too cold, even as he lays her back on the bed, holds her jaw as he kisses her hard but not without finesse. She yanks at his pants, and then his boxers, and Jughead leans over to fumble for a condom in the bedside table, his fingers shaky when he tears open the foil.

He pushes into her quickly, and they both gasp, the sound closer to crying than it is to pleasure. She digs her fingernails into the lean muscle of his shoulders, leaving marks, and Jughead’s fingers dig into her thighs, hard enough to bruise.

“Fuck,” she says, and he leaves a dark mark at the hollow of her throat. “Fuck.”

She comes with another hollow, shuddery moan, and Jughead follows a moment later, hips stuttering against hers. He flops off of her, and they both stare at the popcorn surface of the ceiling, breathing hard.

The momentary reprieve from her own self-loathing ends, and the feeling returns with a vengeance, worse than before. Veronica buckles under the shame, tries to remain perfectly still, trying with everything in her not to cry. She risks a glance at Jughead, and he looks like he’s trying to do the same.

Veronica sits up very slowly, afraid to make any sudden movements for reasons she cannot explain, and hooks her fingers through her lace underwear, shimmying it up her thighs.

She’s sitting on the edge of the bed, doing up the buttons to her expensive blouse, when Jughead finally speaks. He’s obtained a cigarette at some point, and smokes it like he doesn’t really know how, awkward in his fingers.

“Do you ever think about how fucked up our lives have become?” he asks, and her fingers slip on the buttons for a moment.

“All the time,” she says, right before she walks out the door.

x.

_sunday. august 2nd, 2018. 4:07 p.m._

Betty is holding a tray of cupcakes when the opens the door.

For the rest of her life, Veronica will be unable to forget that tiny, crucial detail. Vanilla cupcakes, rows of piped frosting winking up at Veronica when Betty opens the door after only the most perfunctory of knocks.

Veronica, for her part, is perched in Jughead’s lap, her arms around his neck, the expensive lace of her bra against his scratchy, low thread count sheets. There’s a horrid, stilted moment of silence, the ringing emptiness that comes the moment after a gun is shot.

“Oh,” says Betty, finally. She sets the tray of cupcakes down on the counter gently, hardly making a sound, and Veronica wishes that she had slammed it, had dropped the cupcakes, had reacted in any other way than she is right now.

Veronica is already crying, can feel the mascara coming down her face in dark lines, and she scrambles for her clothes on the floor, lost for all of her customary grace.

“Betty,” she says, the sound a sob. “Betty, I am _so_ sorry, we can explain-“

“Don’t,” Betty says, holding up a hand, leaving no room for argument. “Just- don’t. How long has this been going on for?”

She aims the question at Jughead, who has the hollow, glazed over look of someone who has just seen his entire world end and does not know how to even look at the remaining ash.

“Two weeks,” he says slowly, in a trance. “Betty-“

“What, Jughead?” Betty snaps, and finally she is crying, tears dripping steadily down her face, turning them into mirror images. Veronica notices that her hands aren’t curled into fists, and there’s something a little futile about the gesture, like they can still go back, like the situation is salvageable. Like the three of them ( _four,_ she reminds herself sharply) have not waded into something that they cannot come back from.

Jughead stops, lost for words for the first time since Veronica has known him. Veronica fishes for something to adequately express all the premature loss howling through her, the aching, fervent desire to rewind time, make a different choice.

“We never wanted to hurt you,” she whispers, keenly aware that whatever she says will never be enough.

Betty shrugs, swiping hard at her tears, almost darkly amused. “Well, V,” she says, and the nickname twisted with bitterness is like a slap to the face. “You’re not doing such a great job of it.”

Jughead cuts in, finally, dead pale and shaking. “I am so fucking sorry,” he says, voice grated with honesty, speaking only to Betty like Veronica is not in the room. “Betty, I am so sorry. If I could take it back-“

“Don’t do that,” Betty says sharply. “Don’t pretend that- that we’re all _friends._ That this can be fine.”

Veronica is stung despite herself, even knowing well she has no right to this hurt.

“We aren’t friends, Veronica,” Betty replies. “Friends don’t do the things we do. We’re people that go through the motions of being friends.”

“That’s not true,” Veronica says. She remembers every milkshake date at Pop’s, every post cheerleading practice sleepover, every traded secret and shared mystery and the night after Archie was arrested when she climbed into her bed and Betty held her as she cried. She remembers the missed phone calls and white lies and blood that they have been responsible for spilling. That can’t be _nothing._

 _“_ Of course it is,” replies Betty. “Archie is in jail and you’re fucking his best friend.”

Veronica’s first thought is that she’s never heard Betty say _fuck_ before. Her second thought is that she may be right.

“I love you,” says Jughead, and it’s so similar to the way that Archie had said it that Veronica flinches at the same time as Betty.

“That’s besides the point,” Betty says, not angry or sad but _resigned._ “After everything that’s happened we just- we’re all too broken. There’s no use to keep pretending that everything is fine.”

“So what are you suggesting? Veronica asks. “That we just stop talking? Pretend we don’t know one another?”

Betty stares at the cracked paint on the wall. “My internship in L.A offered me a full time position, and housing”

Shocks slides like a knife through Veronica, the implications of the statement knocking her entire world out of orbit once more. “What?” asks Jughead, looking like he’s had the wind knocked clean out of him.

“I leave in two days,” she says, crossing her arms tightly around herself, defensive. Silence hangs around the three of them, and Veronica thinks about that very first night they had met, her and Betty and Archie, standing in Pop’s and talking about Capote and onion rings. The air had seemed to shimmer with promise back then, foretell that something grand was out there, if she was only bold enough to go get it. Now it seems flat. Deadened.

“So, this is how it ends,” Veronica says, sad and fond and devastated and relieved and a hundred other things all at once.

“I guess so,” says Jughead.

Veronica wants to say something to mark the occasion, to denote the end to something that she thought was going to be forever. _Godspeed,_ maybe. _Excelsior._

“Goodbye, Veronica,” Betty says instead, almost smiling through her tears. She pauses a moment. “Goodbye, Jughead.”

Betty Cooper turns and walks out the Jones trailer for the first time, blonde ponytail swinging behind her, cupcakes left on the kitchen counter.

Jughead sinks his face into his hands, the picture of devastation, and Veronica wonders if this is what rock bottom feels like.

She fishes her stockings off the trailer floor, gets dressed, wipes the makeup stains off of her face. She feels numb all over, incapable of feeling anything other than the white static that blurs her thoughts, echoes through her bones.

“The thing about you Veronica,” Jughead says, voice flat, measured. “Is that you almost deserve it.’

She flinches. “The thing about you, Jughead, is that you never did,” she replies, just as coolly.

Veronica knows what she needs to do. She walks all the way to the Pembroke, ignoring the strain on her muscles, the loss she does not know how to come to terms with. The doorman lets her in like nothing has ever changed, and Veronica straightens up her shoulders in the elevator ride up to the Lodge residence, stares at her reflection in the gold-plated wall.

Hermione and Hiram Lodge are sitting down to dinner when she walks in, at opposite ends of the grand table and holding oversized glasses of wine that cost a small fortune. Veronica sucks in hard breath, preparing to make a last play.

“I’m here to make a trade,” she says, voice ringing with the confidence of someone who has nothing left to lose.

“Very well,” Hiram says, looking nearly amused. “What did you have in mind?”

“I want Archie out of jail,” Veronica says. “I know you can get him out with nothing on his permanent record.”

“That’s a big ask,” says Hermione, dabbing at her mouth with a linen napkin. “Why would we want to do something like that?”

Veronica takes a steadying breath. “I want to leave Riverdale,” she says. “I want things to go back to the way that they used to be. I know your plans here have been muddled, and the complication isn’t worth the public scrutiny and risks you’re taking. Have mom step down as mayor because she wants to spend more time with her family and liquidate our assets here. We can go back to New York, and I swear on our family name that I will stop fighting both of you. I’ll stay loyal to the Lodges, be the perfect society girl again. It’ll be like Riverdale never happened.”

It’s a risky play, and Veronica watches transfixed as her father tips his head, considering.

“If I agree to this,” he says slowly, emphasizing the _if._ “You cut all contact with Archie Andrews and the rest of your friends here. If I find out that you’ve reached out to them, you will be sent to a school that makes the Sisters of Quiet Mercy seem like a picnic. Do we have a deal?”

Veronica nods. “We have a deal.”

“Very well,” Hiram says. “I’ll have Marcus start packing our things. Be ready to leave by morning.”

He disappears, presumably to go make arrangements, and Hermione stands up from where she was seated at the table. She steps forward to hug Veronica, and she cannot help but melt into her mother’s embrace, that instinctual source of comfort, her mother’s silk blouses and expensive perfume, “Oh, mija,” she says. “Soon Riverdale will seem like nothing but a bad dream.”

Veronica swallows her tears and nods stiffly. Her mother brushes some hair back behind Veronica’s ear. “I need to go make some calls,” she says. “Why don’t you come and eat?”

“That sounds just like what I need,” she replies, but as soon as her mother disappears into her office she goes into her room, digging through her jewelry box until she finds what she’s looking for.

Veronica Lodge hooks on her pearl necklace, and wishes Riverdale goodbye.

 

IV. ARCHIE

_saturday. august 20th, 2018. 3:12p.m_

Archie steps out of prison and into the sunlight, so bright and clean that it almost hurts, cutting through the dirt and grime and shame that’s ground its way into his skin. He drops his scarce possessions and tips his head back, breathing in that end of summer smell and waiting to feel like a real person again.

“Archie!” cries his mother, and he is already in tears when he wraps his arms around her, his father joining a moment later, the three of them a tight knot, breathing in one another’s relief.

“Oh, my boy,” his mother keeps saying, petting his hair and examining his pale skin and tired eyes, refusing to release her hold on him. His father is crying too, one arm hooked around tightly around him.

“I missed you guys so much,” he says, trying to swallow the lump in his throat. He didn’t quite know whether he would ever get to hold them again, see them outside the dull light of the prison, and the relief is so intense that it’s a little bit painful. He pulls back a little from their messy hug and looks around the parking lot, trying to catch a glimpse of his friends.

“Where’s Veronica?” he asks his mother. “Is she waiting back at the house, or something?”

It would be like Veronica, he decides, to throw some sort of big _Welcome Home_ party, to celebrate his return in the grandest fashion possible. But all her really wants is her, and the rest of his friends. He wants Veronica’s arms around his neck and Jughead cuffing his shoulder, wants Betty’s happy tears and his parent’s laughter.

Mary’s face clouds over, like there’s something she doesn’t want to tell him.

“What is it?” he asks. “Where is she? And Betty and Jughead?”

“Sweetie-“ his mother starts, placating, but Archie shakes her off, a bad feeling sinking into the pit of his stomach.

It’s his father that breaks the news, placing a comforting hand on Archie’s shoulder. “Veronica moved back to New York, Arch,” he says quietly.

Archie laughs, incredulous. “This is a joke, right?” he says. “She’s making you say that so that the party can be more of a surprise. That is _so_ not funny, you guys.”

“You’re father isn’t kidding, honey,” says his mother. “I am so sorry. Veronica made amends with her parents, and she moved back to the city with them. From what we’ve heard, she’s cut off all contact with Riverdale.”

“That can’t be possible,” Archie says insistently, panicky. “Veronica wouldn’t do that to me. She wouldn’t.”

“Things got hard while you were away, son,” says his father, placating. “She had no money, no place to live, you were gone- she must have panicked. Thought she didn’t have any other options.”

Betrayal nosedives through Archie’s stomach, the pain of it so acute that it feels like a physical thing, sharp and unrelenting.

“Then where are Jughead and Betty?” he asks, not knowing how things can get any worse.

“Betty left to go back to her internship in L.A,” Mary explains gently, trying and failing to soften the blow. “Alice Cooper has fallen into some sort of hippy dippy Scientology thing and just let her go. And Jughead decided after Betty left that he would be better off in Toledo, with his mother.”

 _This cannot be happening,_ he thinks to himself. “I don’t understand,” he says, looking back and forth between his parents. _They can’t all be gone._

“I’m so sorry, Archie,” says his dad. “They’re gone.”

“There’s one more thing,” says his mother. “Your father and I have talked it over, and we’ve decided that it would be better for you to have a fresh start in Chicago with me. New school system, new kids, a chance to start over and move on from everything that’s happened this year.”

“Right now?” Archie asks, voice cracked because he’s trying not to cry.

“No, of course not,” says his dad. “We’ll give you a few days to adjust, to settle back in.”

“But before the school year starts in Chicago,” finishes his mother.

Archie drags a hand back through his hair, and the boy who just wanted to write songs and play football is so fucking far gone he’s not sure that kid ever really existed.

 

to be continued.

  
  
  
  
  
  



	2. part ii.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello!! if you're sticking around, welcome to chapter 2! I hope you enjoy!!!
> 
> tw: discussion about suicide, a whole lotta angst

The past always reaches us across a space which we want to deny. It reaches us incomplete, and in attempting to make it whole we merely create a new incompleteness."

—  | Thomas M. Greene, _The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry_  
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TEN YEARS LATER.

 

I. ARCHIE

_wednesday. september 16th, 2028. 5:37 p.m._

Archie is just getting off work when he gets the call, slinging his tired body into the seat of the pickup, sweat and dirt dried down onto his skin like a second skin and muscles wringed out with exhaustion. The September weather is still all too hot, and Chicago glints in the early evening light, infusing the city with a sort of grimy nostalgia.

His phone rings, the default tone he hasn’t bothered to change, and he glances down to realize that the flashing number has a Riverdale area code. Archie’s world pitches and slides, upends itself once more. He hasn’t spoken to anyone in Riverdale, apart from his father, in ten years.

He lets the call ring all the way through, unsure what to do or say, whether or not he should pick it up. The notification for a new voicemail flashes a second later, and Archie opens it with a sense of bone-deep trepidation, a splinter of the past trapped in his cellphone. His fingers are shaky against the screen.

“Hi,” the voice on the other line says, not quite familiar enough to place, just a little bit nervous. “I’m looking to speak with Archie Andrews? This is Toni Topaz. Please give me a call back.” She rattles off her number and ends the voicemail with no goodybue, and Archie tries to remember her face more precisely, reconciling the leather and cotton candy pink hair with the surprisingly subdued voice on his phone.

Archie runs a hand through the sweat-dried peaks of his hair and tries to breathe, deciding what he should do next. He thought he had finally outrun Riverdale. His eyes close, and then there’s a sharp rap on his window, sudden enough to make him jump.

It’s only Jack, one of his buddies from the site, and the other boy grins widely at him, all gleaming white grin and dark hair. “You good, Andrews?” he asks, and Archie manages a weak nod, thumb poised over the _delete_ button.

“Yeah,” he says after a moment. “Yeah, I’m all good. We still on for pool on Friday?”

“Hell yeah,” Jack replies, and then walks off with a casual _Later, man,_ leaving Archie to fend off his incoming panic all on his own.

_Just get home,_ he thinks to himself, exhaling a long breath, and then another. He starts the car and begins to drive home, dazed and nearly catatonic, fighting against the memories his brain is threatening to summon up. He cannot imagine what Toni Topaz could possibly need from him, all these years later.

His apartment is small and cramped, on the less than great side of town, but he has it all to himself, enough room for all of his sheet music and his old guitar. He walks through the door, and the cat twines around his legs, a small, reassuring presence.

“Hi, Sylvie,” he says, reaching down to pet her, even as she meows loudly at him, wanting food. She was part of a litter of kittens he found at one of the sites planned for demolition, and then took a week of work off nursing back to health, eventually giving away to various guys on the crew. She makes the apartment feel less empty, somehow.

Archie goes through the routine of making dinner, pasta with plain sauce because he’s still a terrible cook. All the while, he keeps thinking about Toni’s message, about the past dredged up like a dead body. It’s almost become easy, to dismiss that one year in Riverdale as a bad dream, that all the blood and horror was something out of his imagination, prison nothing more than some unfamiliar nightmare.

It does not matter. He eats dinner. He watches three episodes of Seinfield. He dangles a mouse toy on the carpet for Sylvia. He gives up on the jig and pulls his phone out of his pocket, dialing the number.

“Hello?”

“Hi, is this Toni?” he asks, standing up to pace around his small kitchen, strangely nervous.

“It is,” she replies, sounding suspicious.

“This is Archie,” he says, a little awkwardly. “Archie Andrews. Um, I think you called me earlier?”

“Yeah,” Toni replies, more easily than before. “Your dad gave me your number.” Archie takes a moment to contemplate the fact that his father still apparently speaks to his ex-best friend’s gang member friend. Toni doesn’t elaborate any further, and he fidgets in the strange beat of silence.

“Was there something you needed?” he asks after a moment, when it appears that Toni isn’t going to say anything more. He hears her exhale over the phone, voice a little ragged.

“Cheryl is dead,” Toni says suddenly, voice hard, nearly betraying the pain underneath it. Archie chokes on his own breath and sits down hard on a kitchen chair, causing a screech against the linoleum.

“What?” he asks, all the air shocked out of him, like getting knocked into a freezing lake. _Fuck._ He cannot picture Cheryl not alive, not scheming, not making a razor-quick barb with her lipstick red and potent.

“She killed herself,” Toni says, voice still firm, like she’s throwing everything she has into not breaking down. “Four days ago.”

“That can’t be possible,” Archie insists, but he keeps thinking about that day out on the lake, Cheryl’s white dress, the way blood had spilt over ice and he’d been so cold he couldn’t feel anything at all. It can’t be possible, but he remembers what she had felt like in his arms, that sad smile she had given him the night he tried to be a part of her world.

“Apparently, it is,” Toni says, bitter and so obviously heartbroken that Archie can feel his heart wrench in his chest.

“Shit,” he says. “Toni, I am so sorry. Is there anything I can do?” He knows all too well that there isn’t anything, not really, not when grief is gnawing a hole in someone’s chest, but it seems like the best thing to say.

“Yeah, actually,” Toni says, surprising him. “I was calling to invite you to the funeral.” There’s a drawn out pause, like she’s trying to find the right words. “Cheryl always liked you,” she says, finally. “Even when she tried not to show it.”

Archie smiles in a way that means he’s about to cry.

“She always was that way,” he says, and there are a thousand memories in his head, kindergarten playdates and him yanking on her pigtails and the time she demanded he dance with her at the sixth grade formal, all awkward sway and stale cupcakes.

Toni clears her throat, crying and trying to hide it. “Anyways,” she says stiffly. “The service is on Friday at four.”

Archie hesitated, sputtering to stop. He hasn’t been back to his hometown in ten years, and is unsure whether he can do it now. Even the thought of it douses him in a wave of panic, the feeling of picking at an old scar, reopening a wound that healed wrong.

“I, um, need to check my work schedule,” he says lamely. “To see if I can take time off.”

“Okay,” Toni replies. “Just let me know.”

There’s one more loaded silence, and Archie clears his throat. “Bye, Toni,” he says, and she hangs up the phone, the dial tone ringing hard in his ear.

Archie gets up and pours himself a glass of water with shaky hands, wondering idly if he’s going to be sick. Too much of the past at once is a deadly thing, enough to send him careening back into things that he still doesn’t understand. Into the black that would consume him for minutes, hours, entire days at a time.

For six months after the great falling apart, after they were flung across the country like perfect strangers, he tried calling every single night. Even after he knew better, even after when the last of his stubborn hope had withered and died.

First Veronica, then Jughead, and then Betty. It was a sort of sick, desperate routine, a fervent desire for one of them to answer him, to tell him what happened, tell him there had been some sort of terrible misunderstanding, that they were coming to get him and bring him home. The prodigal son, returned.

For a while he would think that he had seen them, too, a blonde flash of ponytail in the hallways at school, a soft laugh through the school hallways, the edge of a tattoo peaking out of a t-shirt. Each time, the relief was immediate, a chemical rush, like when he’d get separated from his mother at the grocery store as a kid and nearly weep when he found her in the produce aisle, hopelessly consoled and too stubborn to admit it.

But nobody ever called, and nobody ever appeared on his doorstep, and eventually he pushed all of it to the back of his head, built up a new life in his head, so well that sometimes he’s able to forget that any of it ever happened. Like he did not exist until he stepped into Chicago with his meager possessions crammed in a threadbare duffel bad.

“I can’t go back,” he says aloud to himself, like he’s really a crazy person. He can’t. It’s been too long and not long enough at all to rip up the fragile stitches holding him together, to go back to the person he was without doing irreparable damage.

But then- he thinks of Cheryl. Cheryl with her bitchy asides and strange kindnesses and bucketfuls of tragedy. Cheryl, who he will never see again.

Archie sighs, knowing it is a terrible idea but powerless to stop it, and calls his boss to cash in all of his sick time for a week.

 

x.

_thursday. september 17th, 2028. 1:13 a.m._

He sleeps fitfully for a few hours, sweating through tangled sheets, before he gives up on the illusion of rest and slaps at the bedside table until his fingers bump into the cracked screen of his iPhone. He squints against the bright squrae of light and punches in his passcode half-asleep, turning until he’s on his side.

In all the years since he’s left Riverdale, Archie’s never once looked his former friends up online, even when he was still convinced they were going to swing in and rescue him. There was some lingering fear that there would be no evidence of them ever existing, proof that it was in his head all along. Or else, he would go on and the three of them would be smiling in a booth at Pop’s, grinning hard at the camera and better off without him. Better not to know. Better to live in that gray, ambiguous space.

Only now- he could go back and retrace the mystery that’s trailed him insistently into adulthood. To know for certain, to find out exactly what happened. He could see them, maybe, or at least the place that they grew up together.

With shaky fingers, Archie types _Veronica Lodge_ into Instagram, heart rate accelerating with every rotation of the loading bar. Her name pops up after a few seconds, a blue tick mark beside it that indicates her million followers, and Archie clicks her profile with his breath caught in his chest. It’s public, of course, and the pictures that appear are glossy and saturated with color, impossibly glamorous, like something out of a movie.

There’s Veronica kissing the cheek of some old billionaire at a charity gala, Veronica taking a mirror selfie in a luxurious white bathrobe, Veronica surrounded by clusters of identically pretty girls, batting their eyelashes at the camera and posing with oversized glasses of wine.

Archie scrolls and scrolls, trying to reconcile the flashy, elegant debutante in the photos with the girl who couldn’t make pancakes without burning them and padded around the kitchen in nothing but one of his t-shirts, bare feet against the tile and hair rumpled from sleep.

There is none of that here, in the slick glamour of birthday trips to Vegas and fizzing flutes of champagne, in Veronica’s reflective, enigmatic, half-smile, a joke that only she is in on. She’s only gotten more beautiful as she’s gotten older, but there’s something strangely sad about her, too. Something that rings hollow.

It only takes a few minutes to reach the bottom, and Archie realizes that her first post was made the day she went back to the city, every trace of Riverdale scrubbed clean from her account where there used to be photos of him sleeping in her bed, Betty and Veronica in cheerleading uniforms with their arms wrapped around one another, Jughead scowling and flipping off the camera.

He looks at the first photo, the closest version to the girl he once knew, Veronica posing in a bikini by an absurdly clear blue pool, a dark patch under her collarbone that looks for all the world like a fading hickey.

His stomach suddenly turns, and Archie clicks out of her profile with a vicious speed, slamming his phone back down on his nightstand and letting the darkness press back in on him. There’s a strange grief sinking through him now, a mourning for the girl he once knew, who is gone now and will be gone forever. Veronica grew up and moved on and is beautiful and successful and Archie is in his apartment on the worse side of Chicago, still being turned back into the past, buffeted by it, unable to move on. And what’s worse, he misses her still, no less painfully than he did at sixteen, only farther away.

The last conversation that they had ever had loops on repeat through his head, _take care of yourself_ and _I always do._ They had both meant it, and that was always the problem.

Archie sighs and rubs at his face, turning over in his bed. Riverdale is already settling back into him, like a sickness. Like something that will kill him if he is not careful.

 

x.

_thursday. september 17th, 2028. 8:18 a.m._

 

He packs for the roadtrip that he and Jughead never took and leaves the next morning.

It’s only for a week, no more, no less, but there’s already something terrible brewing inside of him, like he’s driving back into the past, years unwinding alongside the miles. Like if he looks in the mirror it will be his sixteen year old face, terrified and in so far over his head he couldn’t tell which way was up. Like he’ll turn and Veronica will be in the passenger seat, teasing him about using turn signals and sipping on an overpriced iced coffee.

_Haunted_ , is the word for it, not in the spooky way him and Jughead used to rib one another about as kids, but in the sense that he is never quite in the moment, hasn’t been for years. Even now, his friends are ones borne of pure circumstance, skating on the edges of one another’s lives, never dipping past the surface of playoff games and poker nights and pre-approved masculine fun.

There have been girls, too, pretty girls with shiny hair and lip gloss smiles, glancing at him from across the bar, sipping at slim-necked bottles of beer like there’s something mysterious about the act. Girls whose bras he’s unhooked in the filmy light of his bedroom, the easy familiarity of physicality, all mouths that taste like vanilla flavored vodka and quiet gasps. Girls he could have loved, if he were not so lost in how own head. Girls who were never Veronica, no matter how alike or different they were.

_You are so fucked,_ he thinks to himself abruptly. _It’ll be fine._ He’ll say hi to his dad, who he still doesn’t call enough. Attend the service for Cheryl. Come home with his head screwed back on straight. One more trip back for closure, and then finally, finally, the past will stay on the page where it is meant to be. Finally he’ll be able to give up the ghost.  

Archie twists the knob down on the radio and calls Toni, one eye on the road and the other on his phone. It rings nearly towards the end before she picks up.

“Yeah?” she asks, groggy from sleep and sad-sounding, surprisingly fragile.

“Um, hi,” Archie says. “It’s Archie. I just- I wanted to let you know that I’ll definitely be there for the funeral service. I’m driving down today.”

Toni scoffs on the other line. “Like there was ever a chance you wouldn’t, Andrews,” and there’s no real argument for that, after all.

 

II. BETTY

_tuesday. september 15th, 2028. 5:09 p.m_

 

Betty gets the call in the late afternoon, just before her last appointment, and she is still not adjusted to the shock of hearing from her older sister when she settles in behind her desk, watching as Elsie Cooke sulks into the room, all private school uniform skirt and blunt cut bangs, the lingering smell of Parliaments and sickly sweet, adolescent girl perfume.

Elsie is Betty’s favorite patient, though she’d never admit it aloud. Psychiatrists aren’t supposed to pick their favorites, but Betty’s always been irrepressibly fond of the girl, whose parents sent her to therapy after she was suspended for flashing the nuns at her school’s homecoming dance, high on something one of her classmates gave her and cheap Chardonnay she and her friends had poured into a bottle of Sprite.

“I don’t see why I need to be here,” she had said in their first session, and there was a flash of Jughead in Elsie’s imperious scowl, the way her eyes flicked around the room in distrust.

That was two years ago, and Betty’s watched Elsie grow up into a still incorrigible teenager, beautiful and opinionated, strangely fragile in the ways you wouldn’t expect, a girl who takes everything straight to the chest. She reminds Betty of Veronica, that way.

Sometimes, it’s a blessing. Other times she thinks she’s cursed to see her old friends in everyone she meets.

“Hi, Liz,” the girl in question sighs as she flops down onto the couch, a cloud of bleach blonde hair pillowing onto the old couch. “You won’t _believe_ the day I’ve had.”

Betty can’t help but laugh a little bit. Elsie’s melodramatics are familiar, so routine that she can nearly drown out the panic of the phone call, Polly telling her the news of Cheryl’s death, explaining the logistics and readings of the will with a blunt, Cooper-like pragmatism. She didn’t even give Betty time to react before hanging up the phone, just told her that Alice was making up a bed, and expected to see her in Riverdale in two day’s time, an old thread tugging her back despite her protestations.

She starts herself out of her reverie and throws herself back into work, drowning out the chaos in her head to carefully study Elsie’s slumped posture and the relentless tapping of her black-polished fingers against her knee, worrying at the hole in her black stockings. As always, she’s managed to abide by her conservative Catholic school’s dress code while still looking somehow disrespectful.

“More trouble with your friends?” Betty guesses. Elsie is friends with a close-knit, temperamental group of girls, and their closeness often leads to brawls that last for weeks at a time, the knock down, drag out fights of teenage girls.

Elsie smiles, looking darkly amused. “Well, that’s a given, isn’t it?” she asks, and finally sits up, curling her legs underneath her on the couch and propping her head up on one hand.

“Sixteen year old girls are their own sort of vicious,” Betty replies, and her mind briefly snaps to Cheryl, her bloody grin and uncanny ability to see all the places a person was breaking. It’s unfathomable that someone like Cheryl Blossom could just _die._

“Yeah,” Elsie replies with a bladed smirk. There’s a pause as she considers something. “What were you like, when you were my age?”

Betty makes a _hm_ kind of noise, stalling for time. There’s no good answer to that question. At sixteen, she was a good girl and a liar, villain and hero, terrified and grossly over confident, cynical and still naive. She was a mess of everything, no guiding impulse to lead her through the world, stumbling blindly from mistake to mistake, murder to murder.

“Stressed,” she answers after a moment, and Elsie rolls her eyes.

“I can see it now. _Lizzy Smith: good girl._ Were you a cheerleader?”

Now it’s Betty’s turn to roll her eyes. “I was, actually. My best friend and I did it together.” The memories are vivid- flashes of blue and yellow uniforms, the football field on Friday night under floodlights, Archie scoring touchdowns and Jughead scoring newspaper features, cheese fries at Pop’s after the game but before the party, rain-soaked hair dripping onto the vinyl seats of the booth.

Elsie is always strangely delighted when she gets any glimpse of Betty’s personal life, and now is no exception. “How wholesome,” she deadpans, disdainful and longing all at once, and Betty is grateful once more that she legally took her mother’s maiden name, divorced herself from the articles that tried to dig up all the salacious details for a few years after her father’s arrest. Nobody in L.A knows that she is the child of the small-town killer.

“Did something else happen?” Betty asks, shifting the focus gently, but sternly, back onto Elsie. “Besides the fight with your friends.”

Something shifts on Elsie’s  face, becomes darker, her previous archness dissolved. “Yeah,” she says. “Peter and Diane are calling it quits. Two thirds of marriages in America end in divorce, or whatever.”

Her heart pangs with sympathy. Elsie’s parents are typical for the part of Los Angeles they live in- wealthy corporate executives, charming and utterly disinterested in their only child’s existence. Her mother was letting her cherry pick the liquor cabinet sometime around her thirteenth birthday, so long as she didn’t embarrass the family name.

“I’m so sorry,” Betty says, making eye contact so that she knows she means it, and Elsie stares resolutely down at the floor, mouth twisted into a hard smile. Her platinum hair catches the light, and the halo it creates makes her look younger, somehow.

“It’s fine,” she replies dismissively. “Turns out all those games of golf were code for fucking my piano teacher. Classic.” She knots her fingers through the ragged, faded friendship bracelets that line her wrists and twists until the skin blanches white underneath. She releases a moment later, fingers flexing, and her wrist blooms an angry shade of red. Betty skims a thumb over the ridged, silvery scars across her palm.  

“Hey,” she says, quietly. “El, you’re allowed to be upset about this. Have your parents had a chance to talk about it with you?”

Elsie scoffs. “Nah. Diane spent all of last night weeping into a glass of red wine and destroying jewelry. Peter is holed up in some condo outside the city.” She sounds dryly unsurprised, like she’s reading off a script, talking about people she’s never met before.

“That isn’t fair to you,” Betty says, voice firm. “Your feelings matter in this, too.” Elsie rips a few more stitches in her tights, widening the gap of exposed skin.

“Whatever,” she says.

Betty doesn’t answer, lets silence float up around them. Two years and she’s learned that Elsie often only says when she’s really thinking when she has time to work up to it. A few more seconds of quiet, and she finally starts, her voice sounding hesitant, younger.

“Hey, Liz?” she asks. Betty nods, and she continues. “Has anything bad ever happened to you? Like, really bad. Or were you always so…” She waves her hand in a loose gesture, and her mind slips in the missing word. _Perfect._

Betty considers not answering, shifting the focus back over to her. But Elsie is possessed of a youthful stubbornness, and she knows that the girl will continue to ask the question over and over, in different ways, derailing the conversation further.

_Has anything bad ever happened to you?_ A gunshot on the Fourth of July, a shattered glass windowpane, another gunshot, a hundred fucking gunshots, her father’s hands wrapped around her mother’s throat, Jughead’s mouth on Veronica’s collarbone, her chest full of fear, days full of fear, cathedrals full of fear. _Something bad._

“Yes,” she says after a silence, voice a little stiff. “Something bad happened to me when I was around your age.”

Elsie nods at that, surprised and not. “How did you deal with it?” she asks.

She considers lying for a moment, and then remembers one of their first sessions, Elsie with her newly dyed hair and nervous, tense energy, like an outdoor cat being confined to a house. Betty promised that she wouldn’t lie to her, not the way her parents constantly did, trotting her out at dinner parties and charity events only to forget her again.

“I wish I could tell you that I dealt with it head on and eventually learned how to be a better person from it,” she says. “But the truth is, I ran away.”

“And when do you stop running?” They aren’t talking about her anymore, thankfully, because the truth is that Betty never did. The truth is that she still is. The truth is that she has to go back, and it terrifies her.

“You stop running when you acknowledge the the past without letting it run you. Stop deflecting. Let’s think about a way to have a conversation with your parents about how this is affecting you.”

x. 

_thursday. september 17th, 2028. 6:32 p.m_

Two days later and she can feel it as she gets closer to Riverdale, like her center of gravity is shifting, barreling down that unbroken stretch of highway. The September air is crisp and senselessly perfect when it rushes in through the window, and there’s a song by _The Doors_ humming on the radio, the very last Jim Morrison ever recorded. Betty hums along a little as she listens, one arm draped out of the car window, breeze rushing through her fingers. _Into this world we’re thrown._

She wouldn’t have made the pilgrimage if it were anybody Cheryl.

Cheryl who made her cry a hundred times in elementary school and was there when it really counted. Cheryl with her barbed wire confidence, who always deserved better than the shitty hand she was dealt by fate. Betty has to pay respects for her, if only for a few days, a quick drop in before she flees back to safe, sunny California.

There’s something about coming back that sends an old ache through her. It’s like having your funny bone struck hard, a wrongness that vibrates up through the core of her.

Betty wrangles with the impulse to leave, to pull an illegal U-turn on the abandoned stretch of interstate and disappear back to the airport, hop a flight back to her safe, numbed out world of medication and reheated cans of soup, Fridays spent alone at the movie theater.

Her life now is one where she does not have to feel very much at all, and that in itself is a kind of luxury, a blessing from unknown forces. She _felt_ things so relentlessly for so many years, emotions that grabbed her by the throat and held for days at a time, struggling for air and kicking against forces she’s couldn’t understand. To be sixteen was a kind of violence, the year that she is still surprised she survived, all blood and teeth and a phone that never stopped ringing.

She tackled the PTSD by learning it all the way through, spent the first year of undergrad dissecting textbooks late into the night, until the screaming in her head abstracted into nothing more than a chemical reaction, the firing of synapses. But the body collects on its debts, even after she managed to beat her brain into submission.

Adulthood, for her, has been plagued by a numb kind of illness, poor appetite and migraines that leave her stranded in her bed for days, a constant, unyielding pain, a hurt so steady one could almost mistake it for comfort.

Even now, she attends her own therapy sessions and takes prescriptions she can understand the chemistry of, sleeping pills that wash her onto a milky, narcotic shore where nothing can touch her hard enough to hurt. She looks in the mirror, and there is an exhausted, haunted look to her face, like the one Gladys Jones used to wear when she came to pick up Jughead from the playground half an hour late. Betty is fine in a way that is not very fine at all.

Only now she’s back, unpeeled from the bland safety of everyday life and thrown into the place that shattered her as a teenager, left her fumbling to pick up the razor-sharp pieces of her identity. Already, she feels something akin to a chemical reaction bubbling in her blood, changing the persona she’s meticulously crafted over the past decade.

The sprawled out highway goes by too quick, and suddenly she is driving past Pop’s at the edge of the town. Nostalgia riles her, every formative memory of her childhood spooling out in the six seconds it takes to go past the warm neon lights. She looks, and there her and Polly are building towers out of packets of jelly, there she is crying in the bathroom after the first day of seventh grade, there Jughead is balling up her messy, complicated pain and pressing her hands to his mouth. It is staggering how little everything has changed.

The rest of the town blurs by in a wreckage of old memories, and finally Betty pulls into her old driveway, parking the car and spending thiry seconds slowly breathing, trying to stable her frantic pulse.

She goes to the front door and swipes her hair back into an instinctive, compulsory ponytail, trying to hide her nerves. She and her mother haven’t spoken since she left for home, aside from their yearly call on Christmas, a painfully slow fifteen minutes each time, like having a tooth pulled with no anaesthetic. The last she heard from Polly, Alice had fall in with some sort of bargain brand Scientology religion, an image impossible to reconcile with her steely, WASP mother.

She knocks sharply, twice, and there’s a flurry of noise behind the door, the wavering voices of children and shuffling feet, the beeping of the oven. Betty has the disorienting, topsy turvy feeling of looking in at her own life, like someone’s come along and picked up where she left off, assmumed the mantle of Betty Cooper.

The door flies open too hard, and a child peers up at her, a girl with strawberry blonde hair and shiny scabs on her knees. “Hi!” she exclaims, and a boy of the same age peeks around behind her, baby faced and with wheat blonde hair that is all Polly.

“I’m Junie, and this is Dagwood, but we call him JJ!”

Her niece and nephew. Betty manages a smile, clutching the flowers she bought as some sort of ridiuclous coming home gift.

“Hello,” she says. “My name is Betty. I’m your mom’s sister.” She cannot believe how big they are. She hasn’t seen Juniper and Dagwood since they were babies, discounting the presents she sends for their birthdays each year, and now they’ve just turned ten. Mini adults, with their own thoughts and feelings and personalities.

“That means you’re my aunt,” Juniper announces, and Betty immediately likes her brashness, the confident way she juts her chin, a dead ringer for Cheryl.

“Yes,” Betty says, stepping inside to the foyer and shutting the door behind her. “It does.” She doesn’t add that she is also their godmother.

“Betty!” announces a more mature voice, and she turns as her big sister appears on the stairs, dressed in an oversized gray turtleneck and carrying a load of laundry on her hip.

“Hi, Poll,” she says, and Polly wraps her in a tight hug, that sisterly bond snapping back to attention. “I’ve missed you.” _Missed you_ doesn’t really encompass it, doesn’t capture the way she feels as if she’s stepped back into her childhood.

“Mom is so excited that you’re here,” Polly chirps, like she hasn’t even heard her. “I think she’s lying down right now, but we’ll have a family breakfast tomorrow.” There’s a weird, hollow hospitability to the room, one she can’t quite put her finger on.

“That sounds nice,” Betty says faintly, overwhelmed, Juniper and Dagwood dancing

around her, talking a mile a minute.   _Why are you here? How long are you staying? Are we sharing a room? Where have you been?_

“Junie, JJ,” says Polly firmly. “Auntie Betty is _very_ tired from her trip. Would you guys bring her suitcase upstairs for and make sure the guest room is all ready?” The twins nod and dash up the stairs, and Polly winks at Betty conspiritorally.

“That’ll keep them occupied for twenty minutes,” she says breezily, linking an arm through Betty’s and tugging her into the kitchen. “C’mon, let me grab you a glass of wine.”

Betty, lost and crawling out of her skin, follow behind.

 

x.

_friday. september 18th, 2018. 3:56  p.m._

 

The funeral is held not in Riverdale’s Presbyterian church, but rather the tiny, private chapel located at the edge of Thistle House, dripping in gold and lavish crucifixes. The weather is sunny and miserable, and there’s a children’s choir singing when Betty walks in, singing something eerie and not at all appropriate for a wake. _That summer feeling is gonna haunt you one day in your life_ , they chorus, and Betty shivers, her stomach twisted with nerves.

She dips her fingers into the gold plated dish of holy water and crosses herself, the gesture familiar even after a decade of not attending church. _It’s just an hour,_ she coaches herself, trying to even out her breathing. _You can make it through an hour._

Already, she can recognize some of her classmates milling around the room, gathered together to celebrate Riverdale High’s most iconic mean girl, talking in reverent, respectful tones. The giant oil painting of Cheryl hung in the center of the room gazes imperiously down on them.

Betty joins the processional line and starts to shuffle towards the front of the room, where Toni and Polly are acting as the closest thing Cheryl had left to family, the twins, washed out in their dark clothing, poised in front of them, shaking hands and accepting the crowd’s condolences with stiff, fixed smiles.

Betty takes the time to admire the stained glass windows in the chapel, including a surprisingly gory portrayal of Judith beheading Holofernes, and misses Cheryl with a surprisingly sharp pain. Cheryl was the only person she stayed in touch with after she left Riverdale, however sporadic their conversations were.

She tries to remember the last time she had seen her, what she didn’t realize was their last interaction in person.

It had been the week before she left Riverdale, and she ran into the other girl in the bathroom at Pop’s, where Cheryl had been reapplying another coat of that shockingly vivid lipstick, waiting to meet up with Toni.

“Cheryl,” Betty had said, somehow unsurprised, and her quasi-relative had flicked a glance over her in the mirror.

“Cousin Betty!” she had chirped, full of her particular brand of vicious cheerfulness. “You’re looking particularly close to a nervous breakdown today.”

Betty had glanced at her reflection in the mirror, at the purple rings circling her eyes and the way her sleeves bagged off of her wrists. She had a point. “What do you want, Cheryl?”

The girl in question had capped the lipstick and slid it into her obscenely expensive Miu Miu purse.

“Nothing at all,” she had said. “But a word of advice?”

Betty had fought the urge to roll her eyes. “Which is?

Cheryl had met her eye in the mirror, smiling that ruthless smile as she fixed a smudge of lipstick with her pinky finger. “Reap what you sow or burn the field down,” she said, and Betty had gone home and emailed her employer from the L.A internship the same day.

_Reap what you sow or burn the field down._ How very Cheryl it was, dropping wisdom like that and then going off to do something undoubtedly worse.

“Betty Cooper,” says a voice behind her, and Betty tenses, unwilling to be recognized so soon. “Never thought I’d see the day.”

She manages a grim smile and turns on her heel. “Hi, Reggie,” she says, quietly, and then Reggie Mantle is pulling her into a hug, much too tight and much too warm for the circumstances. He still smells like cheap, cinammony cologne, like they are still fifteen and bumping into one another in the school hallway.

“Coop! What are you doing back here?”

Betty flicks a glance over to the casket, and arches an eyebrow. “I’m back in town for a couple days,” she says. “Catching up with family.”

“Right,” Reggie replies, easy. “I forgot you and Cheryl were freaky half-cousins, or whatever.”

Betty makes a demure noise of agreement, and curls a hand around her forearm, almost hugging herself. “What about you?” she asks, first to be polite, but also because she and Reggie have always understood one another, in a strange sort of way.

He shrugs. “I took over for Coach Clayton when he retired a few years back. I’m running the varsity athletics at RD High, now.” Betty finds herself genuinely happy for Reggie, who has always lived above the expectation of dumb jock.

“I’m happy for you, Reg,” she says, and he shifts, uncomfortable with the praise.

“Yeah, well,” he says. “Always thought Andrews was gonna get the job, when he graduated.”

Betty tries not to flinch and nearly succeeds. The memories rise, unbidden- Archie, coming home from PeeWee football at age eight, shoulder pads too big for his skinny body, helmet bumping over his head, his missing front tooth. She doesn’t know how to be back here.

Moose arrives, and Reggie leaves to go greet him, clapping a massive hand on her shoulder as he goes, startling another jerk of her shoulders. The four of them were always so obsessed with one another, she thinks to herself, so entangled in their thorny tragedy, it was easy to forget everyone else.

Betty’s just recovering from the encounter, and then sees Veronica coming in the doorway, knocking all the air clean out of her. Veronica Lodge, still so beautiful it hurts, twenty six years old and glamorous, designer handbag in tow and her expression placid, nearly serene, if it weren’t for a certain tightness of her mouth, the harsh excellence of her posture.

It hurts to see her, hurts like a slap to the face, a pain that is both shocking and embarrassing, and Betty can’t breathe for a moment. She regrets coming, regrets it with everything in her, no matter how much she loved Cheryl and no matter how much her loss carved an absence into her. Her entire adult life is an absence, a missing space, and all the pieces are out in front of her, bent hopelessly out of shape.

She knows she cannot talk to Veronica without succumbing to the black hole in her head, so she ducks behind a Serpent she doesn’t know the name of, suddenly grateful for her adult smallness and praying to stay hidden, to have a moment to get her wits about her.

Someone is crying too loudly, garishly, in the front of the room, and the sound grates at her, a near sensory overload, like the prickle of her sensible funeral dress against her legs, the heavy smell of incense. She hasn’t had the urge to dig her nails into the flesh of her palms in years, and now the tug is nearly overpowering. It’s nearly comedic, that she should turn and realize that Archie Andrews is a few people in front of her, hair distinctive even in the dim light of the room.

_Archie._ He looks so grown up, and not at the same time, arms more muscled than they used to be and that puppyish flop of hair over his temple, expression so sincere that she can feel it. For a year after they all fell apart she would watch his calls come in at seven each evening, wanting to pick up and explain everything but somehow unable to. The sour taste of _Jughead and Veronica_ in her mouth too potent to say aloud, recalling the awful flashes of black lace and a beanie on the floor, clothes scattered around the room like the scene of a crime. Eventually, the calls stopped coming, and she stopped waiting for them.

But, here he is. Her childhood best friend. The two of them are in the backseat of the car in a thousand childhood memories, counting one another’s fingers and dreaming one another’s dreams. She wants to tell him that she’s sorry, wants to scream at him for leaving the three of them and letting everything fall apart in his absence, wants to hug him and talk about the summer they attended the same day camp and got to walk home by themselves. It used to be that every scar she had, he had a matching one for. None of their wounds line up anymore.

She’s moved up to the front of the line without realizing, and almost trips when she realizes she’s supposed to be speaking, Toni Topaz in front of her looking older and and absolutely wrecked, the pastel gone from her hair and Polly’s hand rested comfortably on her elbow.

“Betty,” Polly says meaningfully, and Betty hugs Toni, an awkward, stifled thing. “I’m so sorry,” she says quietly. “I know how much you loved her.” Toni nods stiffly, reaches a hand up to fumble with an old-looking, obviously expensive locket.

“Thank you,” she says, just as quiet, and Betty moves on, squeezing Polly’s slender, bony hand as she does it.

The service is open casket, and Cheryl looks shockingly alive, red lipstick and white dress, not much paler than she’s always been. The effect is eerie- Betty half expects her to sit up and purse her lips, make a bitchy remark about how she expected a better turnout.

But Cheryl doesn’t move, and Betty is struck down by a strange grief, for her and Cheryl’s odd kinship, their shared blood and murderous fathers, both the second favorite sibling, both in love with someone from the wrong side of town. She mourns both Cheryl and the closeness that they could have had, if she had stayed in Riverdale, tried a little harder to keep in touch.

She takes Cheryl’s hand, talons manicured and freezing cold. She’s not much for religion anymore, but she wishes her cousin a soft epilogue. She’s suffered enough.

Betty sighs, turns to put Cheryl’s hand back into place, and stops when she notices that her nails have something caked underneath them. White, balled up clumps, like skin. Like Cheryl was scratching at somebody, fighting a person off.

Betty’s heartbeat kicks up in her chest, a sick adrenaline humming through her.

She recounts all the details she can remember from the phone call; Cheryl’s jump off the ancient tower at the edge of her property, body found the next morning dressed all in black, no witnesses, no suicide note, no nothing. _Maybe she didn’t jump,_ she thinks to herself, electricity crackling through her nerves. _Maybe she was pushed._

Well-respected as she was, Cheryl never wanted for enemies. It isn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility, that there was foul play involved. Betty glances around to see if anyone will notice if she takes a surreptitious picture of the skin balled up under her nails, and then dismisses the idea a moment later.

These days, the only mysteries Betty solves are the ones in other people’s heads, but it’s not hard to remember the girl who investigated the more monstrous side of her hometown. She decides, reckless and more focused than she’s been since she got the call, that she’ll look into it, put her madcap theory to rest before returning home.

Betty spins on her heel, ready to strategize, and bumps into the person behind her, an arm coming out to steady her by the waist. She smiles politely, sincere apology at the ready, and looks up to realize it is Jughead Jones standing in front of her, ten years older and the same boy she once fell in love with.

“Betty,” he says, surprised and nervous, pulling his hand away from the small of her back like he’s been burned. “You’re home."

 

III. JUGHEAD

 

_friday. september 18th, 2028. 5:21 p.m_

Jughead replays the barely there, five second interaction with Betty the entire walk up to the newly rebuilt Thornhill, sweat trickling down his back in the thick, end of summer heat. He’s still nauseous from the entire thing, sick to his stomach, a pulsing wave of anxiety and longing that’s so familiar it’s like he’s thirteen, fourteen, fifteen again.

_You’re home._ It was a ridiculous thing to say, childish, as if Riverdale had been a home to any of them in years, their sort-of friend in a casket six feet away. It was just that he had turned, disentangling himself from an excruciating conversation with Kevin Keller, and there she was, a decade later, his hand falling to her waist as if by accident.

The whole thing was so entirely startling he had blurted out the first thing to come to his head, a bad habit he hasn’t had in years. _You’re home._

(The good times, if they’d ever even really existed, were so brief when they were teenagers, a few incandescent months in between one death and another, but he still remembers curling his hand through hers and thinking _home._ Seeing her had flicked some old, nearly extinct, biological instinct inside of him like a light switch, a chemical relief that had unfurled through his veins. _Oh, there you are._ Children who grew up without a steady source of love are always looking for home in other people, his therapist had told him once.)

Him and Betty had sprung apart after only a second, both fumbling to regain their personal space, and Betty had slipped past him before either of them could say anything else, her absence splintering around him.

Jughead had immediately gone and thrown up in the tiny, incense-thick bathroom, sweaty and shivering, unsure how to handle any of this, inexplicably wracked with memories of Cheryl on the ice back when they were still no more than children, the soaked frills of her dress and smudged pink lip gloss, the cold that numbed everything out.

He left without even making it through the line, despite ostensibly being in Riverdale to support Toni.

He handed the Serpents off to her care before he left Riverdale for good, and they’ve kept in spotty contact through the years, sparse text conversations that are heavy with the unsaid. She was the one that notified him when F.P got thrown back in jail from one D.U.I too many, and he helped wire her money for a lawyer when Fangs got arrested on possession charges. There is a certain weight to being in a gang that never leaves him, even now that he is far enough away to be able to dismiss its significance in his head.

He’s sheened over with sweat by the time he reaches the front door, surprised by how long the walk took to the renovated mansion. It doesn’t look new at all, the same Gothic architecture and jutting turrets spiralling tall out of the grounds. Jughead wonders to himself how Cheryl managed to build such a lavish property without her inheritance.

He raps his knuckles on the door, and there’s no response for so long that he has almost given up when Toni answers the door. She’s still dressed in her funeral clothes, but her heels are kicked off, makeup wiped away and hair unpinned from its elegant braids. The overall effect is enough to make her look older and somehow smaller, frailer.

“Jughead,” she says, a ghost of her old smirk curling her mouth. “Come in.”

“Hi, Topaz,” he says, and something compels him to hug her, the crown of her head well below his chin. She sucks in a shuddery little breath, and suddenly she is crying, hideous, wracking sobs that seem too large for how tiny she is.

“I don’t know what to do,” she sobs, and he makes a comforting, shushing sort of sound, the kind of reassurance he’s never really mastered. “What the fuck do I do?”  
He shuffles her backwards, an awkward, half-time waltz into the first of doubtlessly many sitting rooms, populated by stiff, expensively upholstered couches. They collapse heavily onto one of the seats, and Toni balls her fist up in the collar of his button-down, limp with her tears.

“She wasn’t supposed to _die_ ,” she says, and Jughead smoothes a hand up her back, thinking strangely of his mother, who is not dead but might as well be.

“I know,” he says, quietly. “I know.”

“No,” she says, straightening up, swiping the tears from her face, wrestling back her composure. “No, Jughead, it doesn’t make _sense._ We were _engaged._ We were planning on adopting a kid. She wouldn’t just- Cheryl wouldn’t. She just wouldn’t.” Toni looks at him obstinately, like she wants him to disagree.  
He makes the same noise of comfort, but there’s a seed of suspicion curling through him now, the unsaid words that are still in the air. _Foul play._. The mysterious circumstances to Cheryl’s death, the lack of a will.

Toni slumps back against the couch, exhausted with misery, and Jughead rises to get her a glass of water from the massive kitchen. He’s no stranger to the strange, intense storms of grief that can come in pass in the space of half an hour.

The only thing he can find is a crystal champagne flute, and he feels ridiculous filling it up from the refrigerator. But Toni doesn’t seem to notice, taking a careful sip and pressing the cool glass to her forehead, an obvious post-crying jag headache.

“Do you want to lie down for a few minutes?” he asks her, some old instinct from their few minutes of friendship. “Um- I can stick around if you want. Cook dinner for you.”

He’s a shit cook, but he feels bad leaving her alone in this massive house, ghosts lingering in every hallway. Toni nods once and disappears down the hallway, bare feet on the expensive hardwood and her dress gapping at the back where it’s too big.

Jughead pads back into the kitchen, stopping along the way to turn on an ancient-looking gramophone posed in the hallway. The crackling, 50s remnant that comes on helps to dispel the weird quiet from the air, and he rummages through the fridge, humming a little along to himself.

He’s just started to boil water for plain pasta with butter when the doorbell rings, an ominously loud chime that rings throughout the house. Trepidation slides cold and wet down his stomach, and he walks to the front door, not quite knowing what to expect.

It’s Betty Cooper on the other side, a hard, determined set to her mouth that he knows too well. She’s changed out of what she’d worn at the service, and her pretty, cornflower blue dress is at odds with her expression, that strange intensity she only has when there’s a story to be uncovered. Jughead knows what she’s here for before he even opens the door.

Betty registers that it’s him, and her confidence tips off balance, the nerves clear across her face. She doesn’t wear a ponytail anymore, and her hair falls across her shoulders, darker than he remembered it.

“Jughead,” she says, a question in her voice. “I- I was looking to talk to Toni?”

“Right,” he says, too quickly. “Right. She’s lying down right now but- you can come in?”

“Sure,” she replies, and he opens the heavy door for her. It’s cooler inside, the lighting more dimmed, and Betty rolls her shoulders reflexively, a nervous tic she does when she’s trying to regain control of a situation. They both pointedly do not mention his slip earlier in the day.

She follows him to the kitchen, where the water is boiling over, dripping down onto the marble countertops. “Shit,” he says emphatically, resenting Thornhill’s ridiculous aesthetic standards that apparently don’t leave room for things like paper towels.

He bangs around the drawers, looking for something to clean the spilled water, heartbeat quick and panicky in his ears, not really because of the mess that he’s making. It’s overwhelming, terrifying, being so close to her after so long, the past pressing up ominously against the present. He slams his thumb in a drawer and swears loudly, shaking out his hand.

“Here,” Betty says, and he looks up to realize that she’s holding an embroidered dishcloth out to him, something that would be amused in her expression, if it weren’t so lost.

“Thanks,” he mumbles, adjusting the burner and sliding the rag over the table, the silly, momentary crisis already forgotten. Everything unsaid rises up once more between them, a body lingering in the corner of the room.

There is still a part of him that wants to explain, that wants to beg forgiveness, wants to say that he was sixteen and scared, that he still didn’t know how to be loved, that he regretted it in a way that changed something in him down to the very atoms. That he has spent his entire adult life writing about that one year, trying to find a story that does not hurt.

“How long are you in town for?” he asks instead.

Betty makes a soft, considerate sound and leans against the counter with one hip. “I’m supposed to leave tomorrow,” she admits, voice thoughtful and hiding something. “But I think I might stick around for a couple days. Catch up with the twins.”

It’s a test, and Jughead considers his next move carefully, stirring at the soggily overcooked Rigatoni. “You’re looking into Cheryl’s death,” he says, a calculated bluff, and Betty tenses, spine stiffening in a way that is almost painful to watch.

“How do you know?” she asks, voice suspicious and posture tense, like she’s retracting into himself. His chest aches.

“Toni mentioned some stuff earlier,” he says. “A lot of it doesn’t seem to add up. I figured that if there was a case, you’d be on it.”

Betty considers him, not bothering to be subtle around it. Her lack of faith is a warranted sort of pain, and Jughead tries not to squirm under the sharpness of her gaze, keep his face as honest and blank as possible.

“I don’t do that anymore,” she says, and something crumples inside his chest, like the collapsing of a flimsy cardboard box. But then she hesitates for a moment, making him glance up. “But what do you know?”

He dumps the too-soft noodles into three bowls, throwing chunks of butter from the fridge in after, collecting his thoughts.

“Just that Toni is suspicious about foul play being involved,” he says. “They had a bunch of big plans coming up.”

Betty nods tightly, taking a small bite of pasta and nearly hiding her wince at the taste. “There was skin under Cheryl’s fingernails,” she says. He doesn’t bother to ask if she’s sure. She wouldn’t have mentioned it to him if she wasn’t positive.  
“Okay,” he says. “Suspects?”

“I think the first step is figuring out where Cheryl got the funding for all this,” she says, waving a hand at the elaborate home sprawled out around them. “Last time I talked to her, she said that she only got a little bit of her inheritance because of legal feels and Penelope. Where did the money come from?”  
“I was thinking the same thing,” he says, mentally flicking through the exotic locales of the Blossom-Topaz vacation Instagrams, the designer shoes stacked in the front doorway with their gaudy labels. “Maybe- maybe Cheryl made a deal with Claudius and Penelope that went wrong.” There isn’t much he’d put past Cheryl’s harpyish mother.

Betty gnaws her lower lip. “Alright,” she says decisively. “You go take the food to Toni. I’m going into Cheryl’s old office, see if I can dig up any files.”

Jughead briefly considers whether this is a betrayal to Toni, but Betty disappears before he can, blonde hair flashing under the hallways lights. He grabs the bowl and walks over to what he assumes to be the master bedroom, knocking twice before he steps inside.

Toni is passed out in the middle of the bed, her small frame dwarfed by the king sized mattress, and something in him starts at the sight, still in her fancy dress and red-eyed from crying. He tugs the comforter up over her body and leaves the dish on her nightstand, flicking the light off as he goes.

He goes back down the long hallway, eyeing the creepy taxidermied animals lingering in corners, and Betty jumps when he steps into the oak-paneled office, all deer in the headlights with her hands full of files. Jughead shuts the door quietly behind him. “Anything?” he asks lowly, and she shakes her head, frustrated.

“None of these have anything concrete,” she says. “Cheryl got Blossom Industries back up and running about six years ago.”

“But?”

“But they started turning a profit way too fast,” she says, shaking her head. “It doesn’t make sense. According to these papers, they were back up to the annual revenue that Clifford had in only three years. They were doing an impossibly good business.”

“Where would Cheryl keep evidence of potentially illegal activity?” he asks, and Betty taps her chin, scanning the room.

“We better go through everything,” she says, already testing floorboard for a hollow space, and digging up mysteries with Betty has always been much easier than it should be. Jughead rolls up the sleeves of his dress shirt and starts examining the lamps.

 

x. 

_friday, september 18th. 7:36 p.m_

They check every floorboard, behind each massive oil painting, pat down tapestries and suits of armor, in search of something, _anything,_ to help confirm that Cheryl’s death hadn’t been a suicide. The findings are scarce- a secret stash of saltwater taffy, undoubtedly Toni’s, a ribbon that was trapped between couch cushions, an heirloom ring that Betty found on the floor of the hallway, rolled underneath a heavy armoire.

The search takes hours, and both of them are sweaty and frustrated by the end of it, the smell of mothballs lingering around their clothes and a sense of _wrongness_ that echoes through the manor with no definable source.

“We should head out,” Jughead suggests when the sun sinks low into the horizon, butter yellow and too pretty, sputtering gold light through the kitchen. Betty nods tersely and fills two glasses of water, pressing one to her sweaty neck and passing the other to him.

Jughead takes a long, cool sip, trying to ignore the powder blue vein that spiders down her wrist, the bob of her Adam’s apple. She is entirely distracting, even now, the both of them grown up and still too young to know how to act around one another.

They wash the leftover dishes in silence, and he checks on Toni once more before they leave, humidity finally dwindling now that the sun has set. Betty’s purse thwacks against her side as they walk, and the silence is surprisingly comfortable, both of them dissecting what could have happened to Cheryl in their heads.

“So, what have you been doing?” he asks awkwardly, because he is curious despite himself. “For work, I mean.”

“I’m a psychiatrist, actually,” Betty says with a sly smile, like she’s still surprised by it. He’s stuck with a vivid flash of her at sixteen, complaining about her _bullshit, honestly_ therapist that she had seen after Hal’s arrest. It makes a strange, fitting sense. “I work mostly with adolescents. What about you?”

“Me too,” he says, swiping a self-conscious hand through his hair. He hasn’t worn a beanie in ten years, threw his beloved crown one in the trash before he got on the bus to Ohio, but the instinctural comfort is still there. “I’m actually an English teacher.”

It wasn’t what he expected to do, and fifteen year old him would have been abjectly horrified at his future self _voluntarily_ spending time in a high school, but he loves it, his snarky, interesting students, public school kids that tell him about their days and complain vehemently about Hemingway in class.

He starts a story about one of his tenth graders, and then Betty chimes in with one about her favorite patient, and then it is just talking, sliding back into their easy rapport like nothing at all has changed. He’s in the middle of recounting the time a vape pen was found in the class fish tank, and then stops abruptly when he realizes that muscle memory has led them all the way to Pop’s, the neon light glowing invitingly.

It looks just the same, jukebox in the corner and invitingly cool, and the roll of nostalgia is a viscerally painful thing, the backdrop to a thousand memories, good and bad.

“Old habits,” he says, not really a joke, and Betty picks at the skin of her cuticle nervously. There’s a drawn out silence.

“Do you want to get a milkshake?” Betty asks finally, voice pointedly breezy to hide her indecision. “For old times sake.”

Pop Tate spots them lingering front of the door and waves, older but still the same man that kept him fed through that awful, aching summer he lived in the Twilight. “Sure,” he says, pointedly aware that it was not much of a choice to begin with.

 

IV. VERONICA

_friday, september 18th. 8:32 p.m._

 

“Yes, mother,” Veronica says impatiently as she walks up and down the sidewalk, curling a piece around her finger. “I’ll be back by Monday morning.”  
“Have fun, mija,” Hermione says on the other line, voice deceptively casual. “It’s not everyday a friend gets engaged.”

“Of course,” she agrees tightly. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” A few more pleasantries, and Veronica is finally able to hang up the phone, tensed with nerves and still a little shaky with adrenaline. She sits down hard on the sidewalk, knowing full well that she’s going to ruin her best skirt but too relieved to care. She presses her palms against her thighs, trying to calm down.

Ten years later, and Veronica has earned most of her trust back from her parents, has toed the line and followed every arbitrary rule put in place. But there’s still an unspoken suspicion, an impossibly tight leash every time she has to go out of town.

Before she left, she managed to get into the office computer and crash the tracking device she knows her parents have in her phone, like she is still an unruly teenager and not an adult woman. After that, it was just a matter of convincing a girl she knows from the charity event circuit to throw her engagement trip to Turks and Caicos the same weekend. Enough smiling and expensive checks can get you anything in the Upper East Side.

She’s taken every possible precaution, and yet, Veronica is still terrified, certain that she’s missed something, certain that Hiram and Hermione are going to sweep in and punish her, something cruel and without remorse. She loves her parents, but she now understands that they are merciless in a way that she didn’t fully realize at sixteen. The fallout would be catastrophic, atomize the ever-fragile freedoms that she is granted.

It was a dumb risk to take, coming back at all. Veronica wouldn’t have even found out about Cheryl’s death, if it weren’t for the news alert that flashed on her phone. _Blossom Industries Heiress Found Dead,_ it had read, and something made Veronica set the plan in motion that day, even as everything in her warned her not to.

It was just that she remembered Cheryl- Cheryl arching an unimpressed eyebrow at her during cheerleading tryouts, Cheryl crying in the locker room, Cheryl pulling a wool coat over a pair of Veronica’s silk pajamas the night after Nick St. Clair. Cheryl who was a friend to her, despite all of it.

So she lied and took the Greyhound out of the city, created an elaborate series of lies and fled back to the place that she said she would never return to. In fact, she was so consumed with coming back undetected that she forgot to steel herself against what she would find when she got back.

Archie Andrews. Betty Cooper. Jughead Jones. The three of them, best friends until she had come along, repelled like same-sided magnets in the tiny room of the chapel. Veronica had watched as Betty and Jughead had knocked into one another in the processional line, both flinching back like they’d been shocked, as Archie had left not four minutes after she arrived, studiously avoiding eye contact.

Ten years, and Veronica still hasn’t gone more than three days without thinking about them, wondering if she could have made a different choice, done something that wouldn’t have ruined all of it. If she had just fought a little harder, been a little smarter, not given up so easily. Her guilt hasn’t been at all alleviated through the years, just gotten a little bit tricker, manifested itself in different ways.

There is a part of her that already wants to leave. She attended the wake, sat through a truly unbearable post-service dinner with Penelope and Claudius. There is nothing more for her here, and it scares her how badly she wants to stay despite it.

Veronica stands up, brushing off imaginary dust from her pencil skirt, and starts walking down the quiet, residential street, no clear direction in mind. She’s staying in the McCoy’s old house, settling an old tab with Josie, and she spent the night before going through the Riverdale High yearbooks with a bottle of red wine, crying a little bit when she got to the senior year one, the four of them all absent from where they should have been grinning in caps and gowns.

She lights a cigarette, a habit she’s picked up to give her an excuse to step outside at stuffy galas and dinner parties, and takes a long drag, exhaling into the clean air. The night is cool, indicating that fall is coming quick, and she’s chilly in her little, New York chic outfit, inappropriate for Riverdale’s small town wholesome dress code.

The North Side is surprisingly tiny, and after a few minutes Veronica finds herself at Pop’s, staring wistfully at the warm light beckoning her inside.

_Get a cup of coffee and go,_ she tells herself, a small indulgence, and walks up the old steps. In fact, she’s so caught up in rehearsing what she’ll say to Pop that she doesn’t realize that she’s not the only occupant until she’s already inside.

The bell chimes, and Veronica stops dead in her tracks when she realizes Betty, Jughead, and Archie are in a booth, drinking millshakes and looking deep in discussion about something. For a horrible, violent moment, she’s sure that she’s hallucinating, flashing back to the first time that she ever stepped into the diner.

There’s a collective intake of breath. Betty looks at her and Jughead looks at the floor and Archie looks up at the ceiling, blinking hard like he’s trying to clear his vision.

Seconds pass, over and over and over, and Veronica doesn’t move, frozen to the spot, until finally Betty speaks, mouth curling into that enigmatic, Mona Lisa smile, not quite kind. “Veronica,” she says. “You should sit down.”

And as if in a dream, she does.

  
  
to be continued.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much for reading!! comments are, as always, deeply appreciated, and feel free to come and chat on tumblr @flwrpotts

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much for reading, and feel free to come chat on tumblr @flwrpotts!


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